60 second canine gestures

I'm trying to get better at "fluidity" when drawing animals. My drawings tend to be kind of stiff and I nitpick on details and getting the anatomy correct which simply makes drawing a bit scary and not fun at all. I did some 60 second canine gestures for half an hour. They look very messy but I guess that's to be expected...at first I was nitpickin on details as usual but by the time I got to the last 3 drawings at the bottom, I think I started to focus more on the actual gesture. The image quality is very bad. My scanner is on vacation since my USB cord got chewed into pieces :(

So how am I doing so far? Am I doing the gestures "the right way"?

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/133/d/2/60_second_gestures_by_sarosna-d7i6nq9.jpg

Hi Sarosna! Good to see you again. :)

I really like the gestures you drew and posted. I can tell that you get a little hung up on details every now and then, so it's really good that you managed to focus more on the gesture! Quite a few of them have great motion, so keep up the good work! :)

There's no one 'right way' for this, but it helps to break the bodies down further. Don't mind the contours of the body so much and try to focus on the break-down of the different parts.

Start with the spine line, trying to make it a fluid line (c-shaped at most, never s-shaped). Draw a circle for the head, draw a circle/oval for the rib cage, then a circle for the hips. With these three shapes down, you can add the joints at the shoulders and hip bones. From there one you can break the legs down into joints and limbs. If you skip the joints in the legs, you risk drawing legs that aren't anatomically correct.

I've never drawn animal gestures before (my personal focus is humans), but I drew this 30 second gesture just now to illustrate that the basics are still the same:

http://i.imgur.com/fd8Y4mF.png

Does this help you?

Yes, that helps very much, thank you :)

I was nitpicking on the first few sketches and tried to even nail down some anatomy. But then later on I really started to focus on the gesture and started focusing more on the stick figure. So I guess I'm slowly starting to get the point.

Hello Sarosna! I mostly like all of your drawings, yes i can see you sometimes lose yourself a bit on the details, you may even try and do 30 sec drawings, just a sheet full of them. That way you will be forced to avoid the little details, and get even more motion. Another thing, you wont also have time to take that much strokes when drawing the shape of the dog, you may want to try to shape it with only 1 or 2 strokes, so you have time to get a more complete drawing of the animal and get more motion in to it.
Keep it up! : )