Can someone help me with my gesture drawings?

I just cannot grasp gesture to save my life.

its not even like im bad at drawing, i can draw along with proko fine.

its when i have to make my own gesture drawings that i just completely mess up and get mush.

it frustrates me so much, if anyone has any pointers on waht to look for and how to do it that would be great.

these are all 2 minute gesture drawings

• Kategida edited this post on December 15, 2018 7:49am.
• Sanne edited this post on December 15, 2018 1:08pm. Reason: Fixed the image link

Hi Kategida!

I'm sorry you're having such a hard time drawing gestures on your own. I wonder if it's because your focus on drawing along with someone else made it harder to understand what to look for in a gesture? I see a lot of attempts to refine the figure in the 2 minutes you spend on these, but not a lot of ground work to build upon that allows for natural looking gestures.

2 minute gestures are kind of 'long' gestures in the sense that they give you a lot of time to overthink and add too many details, without capturing the essence of a pose. A 30 second gesture for example is focused on finding the main lines and curves that define the movement of the figure. That could be no more than 3 lines that only vaguely look like anything, but do capture the fluidity of the figure. It's meant to help train your brain to look at a figure, recognize the essential core lines and understand what makes the figure look dynamic and lively.

I highly recommend that you try out 30 second poses and try to capture the figure in 4 lines or less: the spine, the arms and the legs. Add the head if you have time left, but if you get those three basics down move you can move on to the next. It's okay if it doesn't look like a figure, it's about the brain training. Spending about 5 minutes a day doing 30 second gestures like this will help you understand the figures better, and allows you to flesh them out when you move on to longer timers.

Also, I fixed the link for you. On the bottom right of an image in your Sketchbook, there's a shortcode that looks like this:

You'll need to use this code instead of the URL of the image itself if you want to display it on the forums. :)

thanks for trying to help.

i'll keep doing these daily.

Hi!

I like how you captured the rotation in pose three. Maybe you could try doing some faster poses to simplify things to just the gesture. Also, maybe blind (not looking at the page) drawings could help you go from observation to gesture.

Hope that helps and wasn't too much.

Good luck!

Hey there,

Don't even trip. Frustration is a huge part of being an artist, it comes with the territory. It's great that you are frustrated, use that to propel yourself forward!

Here are a few tips that may help you.

Never stop drawing, carry a sketchpad around if you have to, but draw whenever you can.

Draw from life

Use references whenever you can! (especially if you do any digital art) Using references will help you retain key details of a body, or whatever it is that you're drawing, and help you keep things in perspective and proportion.

It is easy to get discouraged and get turned off to drawing, but the trick is to work on things that hold your interest but leave room to expand into other area's as you grow in skill.

Keep up the good work. You can do this!

Your proportions are great! I think the issue is you're not capturing the fluidity of the character. If you try using fewer lines to capture the movement I think you'll see improvement. Good luck to you!