Gesture Feedback

Hey everyone! Im requesting your feedback on todays gesture drawing session. Im kind of confused with gesture drawing everyone seems to do it differently, so Im sticking with the approach taught in the line of action tutorial.

Id appreciate your feedback!

Pictures

You did a good job sticking to the tutorial. Trying to apply someone else's ideas to your own drawings helps you find new eyes for drawing, and begin to formulate new ideas about how your drawings work. And yepp, gesture drawing lessons are a bit of a riddle, as if you look at different teachers, they all propose different approaches and priorities, but still have something intangible in common.

As a self-taught artist, you'll never get as much feedback or firm orientation as you would like to have. You just select one thing and stick to it, and watch yourself to understand what changes. Sometimes you will experience rapid and satisfying improvements, at other times you will feel like you are stagnating, or even feel like your skills diminish, because doubts about what you have thought about establshed rules come about and challenge your confidence.

To me the 30 seconds/1 minute/5 minute/10 minute split of LoA's lessons feels like a setup for experimentation. You develop a foundation basically in the first minute, but the 30 second split forces you to develop it as a sequential process. "So, I will always observe/measure/focus this first, then this second to build the foundation" And then the 5 minute pieces are the proof of concept, where you discover what worked and what did not work.

These look great. It's great to see that as the session goes on you are thinking of the purpose of the circle in the body- not just a circle but the rib cage. I'm especially drawn to the 3rd picture of the person laying down, in this pose the way you have angled the torso circle to have a bit more weight that makes the pose feel more grounded. I'd encourage you to keep trying this way of structing poses in other line of action sessions or in person (a little bit harder) and adding circles to show the arms, legs, etc not just outlining the contour of the body.

Try, first of all, making more circles to represent all the body parts, then you could try stretching or squashing these circles- are the ribs more circular or oval shaped? Does the circle representing the leg start large and shrink like a pear? Is the circle of the pelvis overlapping with any other circles?

Then if you feel bored of circles definetly try changing circles into squares, make the ribs a square, maybe a rectangle? If a leg is a pear-shaped circle would it become a slanted rectangle or a triangle? Then once you are bored of squares try boxes, squres with sides- what direction is this body pointed in? Doodling 3D boxes not assosiated with bodies helps with this so if it gets a little too complicated take a break from people. Hope this helps for some next steps :D

Thank you for your comments, this gives me a whole new perspective on gesture drawing!

The other guys said some really helpful stuff, I can only tell you to not forget that a lyne of action practice is not about perfection, what you do here is look for a way to describe a shape due to understand it, or a line that YOU THINk describes something in the best way.

(Really you can practice for whatever goal you have, but I try to have that in mind to avoid being stuck in an cicle of unfound perfection. I think that can help)