30 seconds drawings..

I have achieved this quality after 3 months of practice. All constructive critiques are welcome.
Thanks for your time
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Hi Janeel,

Your grasp of perspective and anatomy is great!

These are excellent 30 second sketches. What I personally may be missing is a line which describes the big picture. The "idea" you had after looking at the pose (w/o drawing). If you can try to capture that line, the figures will become even more believable. It helps to find the right word (yes, word, e.g. a verb, verbs are good, but an adjective is just as good. "Leaning", "heavy", "delicate", "running", "twisted").

You can split your sessions into anatomy learning poses/sketches (like you have here) and ones where you just attempt to find that word and communicate it with one or two lines ... I must admit, it is hard, and I am still working on it myself, but the gesture becomes so powerful once you capture the impression you had of the pose.

So, in summary: practice understanding the impression the gesture has on you and then practice putting that down in a few long lines, then you can model the arms, legs etc. around those lines. And don't forget to exaggerate! You are not in a dialogue with your audience, you have only a split second or less to convince them to continue looking at your character, the idea you initially had needs to be paramount.

Have fun, enjoy, and let us see more of your sketches soon!

Love, Stuart

P.S. here's the type of 30s gestures I'm doing currently: http://wp.me/a52XTE-Me

Hi Stu,

So, I should first focus on the flow of the gesture, the line of action as an aid to describe the sketches more loudly. I couldn't have guessed that myself as maybe because I am bit nervous around the head and thus I am more determined to get the head direction correctly. Hence, I took the box approach for drawing the heads instead of an egg. Due to this obsession I stopped drawing the line of action at all in order to save extra the milliseconds. Now on wards I'll include the pose' line of action (or the flow). Hope I am telling exactly what you want me to improve.

Thanks a lot for pointing this out.

Now, I want to ask one more thing(may be off this topic as this is first time and place I found recently to speak with )
I am trying to move on from drawing 30 sec to 45,60( so far)...and so on. The problem I am feeling is that I am unaware of the quality level(or standard) one should try to achieve with each succession of the increased time limit. So, If you can show what the maximum or the minimum one should aim for in 45,60..5min, etc. I can focus and push myself further.

Regards,
Janeel

Hi Janeel,

I do gesture drawing as a part time hobby, but I have been keeping up 30 to 60 minutes of 30 second gestures each day for over a year or three now.

I have also wondered often about "what level of realism or detail 'should be' achieved in 30 seconds".

I find, if I can get the line of action correct, everything else seems superfluous. 30 seconds are great to capture the line of action and perhaps the directions of arms and legs, neck orientation and two lines for the horizontal and vertical lines of the face.

Once I have practiced half an hour of 30 second gestures, I may take some photos from a bottom draw (from (sport) magazines or Scott Schuman's fashion books, I like to switch my focus from the PC as often as possible). Then I may spend a minute or two capturing more than the line of action. Still I keep to a simple rendering. Then every now and again, I will attempt to draw a figure or two from imagination, this is a very rewarding lesson. I fail terribly everytime, but these are the moments where I notice what may still be missing and what I 'could' focus on improving.

There are different opinions on this, but I believe, if you can capture a figure in 30 seconds believably (meaning you and the audience can see the flow and recognize what you percieved in the first moment of seeing the figure), then you don't need to prolong the gesture intervals at all. Sometimes I set them up for 45 seconds and find I'm just killing time inbetween. Rack up some thousands of gestures and you will start to not only see figures in your head, you will also start seeing the line of action in people around you. Modelling the limbs around this line is an additional skill, and the degree of realisim you want to achieve depends on your style. Which can change over time, but your personality will always come through if you get the hang of the line of action.

By the way, the same pose can trigger different reactions in you on different days, so that you could come up with different lines of action for the same pose. There is no real right or wrong, if you are honest to your feeling and you practice putting that feeling to paper, then you're doing it right!

Have fun!

Love,
Stuart

Thankyou Sir for sharing your experience.