10 gesture drawings for critique

Hi.

I've started doing some gesture drawing and would like to hear your thoughts on my progress thus far and if you see any specific weakness that I could strengthen. These are all 30 or 60 second drawings with poses either from Line of Action or just some random poses from Instagram. I should note that these are all very small drawings, about 2 inches tall/wide.

Thank you!

Hi there, Thestripper,

I absolutely love your quick sketches in 30 and 60 seconds very much, because they have a lot of looseness and life in those sketches. Keep up the great work!

Again, if I was to provide you a critique, then it would be to make your drawing poses more and more cartoonier and exaggeratedly appealing. Why don't you please do 95 more minutes of 30 second attitudes? The reason why you could do more of those warm-ups is because, if could and would help make your figures the least stiff and the most dynamic, vital, energetic, and fluid. Cheers to you, and I hope you'll find these completely and totally beneficial and nifty.

After looking at my own post I can see one distinct thing that I haven't noticed until now. Let's see if someone else catches on the same thing.

These are really quite well done, I know that proportion is not the aim of a gesture drawing but I've noticed you make the same mistake I tend to make during 60sec, namely that your proportions are a bit skewed. Several have over-long legs or rather large heads or narrow shoulders and so on. Judging proportion quickly by eye is something that tends to come with experience but only if it's done mindfully. I'm sure you've noticed it and that it'll improve over time with more practice.

There's one other thing I've noticed that would really help your sketches. Your line quality. It could be that you've not built up the dexterity, it could be a lack of confidence or it could just be a built up bad habit, but more confident fluid lines would help your gestures really stand out.

There are a lot more in-depth explanations on line quality and confidence available online, I suggest you have a little look.

Hi. Thank you for commenting. I do agree with what you are saying. Line quality is of great importance. In this session I was drawing in a quite small 5"x8" sketchbook and using a thin mechanical pencil so line quality is hard to obtain that way. I'll go up in size, probably draw on A3 newsprint and use a good soft wooden pencil for my next post, see what that does. Thanks again.

• Thestripper edited this post on January 30, 2021 1:22pm.

hi.

They are really nice, one thing i noticed its that the porportion feel a little off. Accuarate proportions are not the point of gesture drawing, but usually its recomended to be prioritize longer extremitys and torsos since the gesture is mostly there. But in the uploaded poses it seems like you tend to do the head bigger (i kinda struggle with the same problem) and that kinda break a little the gesture. Also i really like how you capture the gesture in the head neck and torso, but the legs and arms seems a little stiff, when you are drawing the overall gesture or line of action try to focus in seeing how the flow of the toros transfere to the legs and arms (with the arms its a little trickier i think, but i ussualy look at how the shoulder blades and pecotarles move in order to transfer that flow to the arms.

Very good sense of form and volume of figures, I'd recommend drawing larger (even if they overlap older drawings) and focusing more on proportion, most of these sketches would benefit from closer attention being paid to limbs closer to the viewer being larger than limbs further (sketches 3 and 4 are good examples of the limbs that are closer appearing smaller than those further away). More attention being paid to contour lines and line heirarchy will also greatly benefit future sketches

Hi.

Thank you, that is really good critique! I've done heaps of volumes since this. Just drawing boxes and pipes going different directions. Also switched to bigger format and been trying different media. Also trying to keep in mind to put more "rubber bands" on my models. When this gets more intuitive the drawings have a tendency to get better. Volumes location and in which direction they are going is clearer. Had a good session tonight it felt like. I'll upload some later, hope you take a look, I think they are much better.

Thanks.