New to Gesture Drawing: Two Minute Figures

I'd love to get some feedback on these! I'm pretty new to gesture drawing, so I'm kind of winging this. I'd love to hear what you think!

The first four pages are from October 2nd and the last two are from yesterday, October 12:

(By the way, I usually add the color in afterwards, either in highlighter or digitally, to brighten things up and have fun! But that's not included in the 2 minutes of figure drawing).

• Littlewaysoul edited this post on October 14, 2018 1:33pm.
• Littlewaysoul edited this post on October 14, 2018 1:33pm.
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• Littlewaysoul edited this post on October 14, 2018 3:12pm. Reason: Trying to figure out how to embed images! I think I finally got it. :)
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I enjoy the color you've added. :) Your countour drawings have some fun qualities to them that make them fun to look at it, and it's clear you're starting to develop your own style.

To be very helpful to you, I need to ask: What's your learning goal right now? What are you trying to learn in those 2 minutes?

My guess at the moment is that you don't have a specific goal other than to try and do a drawing in two minutes, and I'm concerned you are currently caught up in having a "finished" drawing that it's nice for others to look at in two minutes flat, rather than using it as an exercise for improvement. It seems like you are focusing on capturing the outside contours of the body, but from this, I don't see any underdrawing or time spent trying to analyze, consider and capture the underlying shapes within the body that create those contours. (Unless you do and you've erased/turned off those layers?)

I think I saw you in another thread talking about that that you never do 30 second drawings and you need to "kill your perfectionism." so I wanted to toss the link to our tutorial which focuses on what to accomplish in 30 seconds -- or at least, one practical exercise that can be done in that time. :) It takes about 15 minutes to go through it.

Thank you, Kim! I actually found that tutorial in a different thread and went through it this morning! It was extremely helpful and I am so excited to keep practicing this technique for figure drawing. You are correct that I didn’t do much underdrawing for the ones I’ve shared here. With those I was using a larger ink brush to try to force myself to make strong line choices rather than sketching things out too much. As for my learning goals, mostly just enjoy drawing people and the challenge of capturing a form in a limited amount of time. I’m hoping to speed up in my ability to capture a certain motion and become more confident in my ability to draw people! I think the tutorial was really helpful in that regard and can’t wait to see where this all takes me! Thanks again for your advice! :)

Your response made me smile. I'm so glad to hear you are enjoying your practice and finding your practices here helpful! :D

I actually really enjoy doing figures with a brush pen working with the tutorial method. It takes a fair bit of practice, but if you want a strong gestural figure fast there’s very little that can beat it. As you practice you get better at linking shadows together with your gesture lines so the whole thing flows. And with a lot of practice you can get finer details out of the brush so longer poses are possible.

Here are the pages from when I worked through the tutorial!

And then I went on to try 30 second figures using that technique. Here they are:

Thank you for that advice, Torrilin! I love my brush pen, so I will definitely have to try that out sometime. Do you have any photos of your use of the tutorial technique with a brush pen? I'd love to see how you build on the line of action quickly to form shapes and shadows!

• Littlewaysoul edited this post on October 14, 2018 3:14pm. Reason: Image embedding!
• Littlewaysoul edited this post on October 14, 2018 3:14pm.

For today's Inktober I did a 30 minute class using the tutorial technique. Here is the result!

• Littlewaysoul edited this post on October 14, 2018 3:16pm. Reason: Image embedding!

Awesome work! I can already see structural improvements :)

Thank you so much, Kim! Are there any tutorials (even written ones) regarding faces/expressions? I've sort of been winging those as well, and I've never tried them in 30 seconds. I might try that today! :)

Not yet, but this is something that's high on my list to get up, along with hand/feet starting tutorials and a number of other exercises!

Awesome! I’m looking forward to it! I might start a separate thread on this in the meantime. Thank you so much for all that you do for this website, seriously.