To improve your shading you don't really need all that plane thingy, just look for shadow shapes to group your value and fill them in with light hatching so that you can build it up later
Look for the feet, if between them and the groin there is an equilateral triangle, chances are you are not going to end up with a very dynamic pose.
Dynamics are everywhere, in line use, mass placement, planes and even light. If you have low contrast between these things your drawing will read as stiff, and that's usually because people mess up or leap over altogether the gestural stage and sometimes even the perspective.
When I draw the head, though sometimes I need to resize it since it often ends up being too small.
Don't worry too much about proportion in the gesture stage, your focus should be on the force/movement behind the pose, and getting caught up in proportional problems early on is a pretty easy way to end up with a stiff pose
You are on the right path, but try following the spine more with your lines, the contour will just suffocate your figures at this early stage
You are not thinking in planes, nor applying construction. Try drawing boxes and cylinders from different angles, Drawing on the right side of the brain would be greatly helpful at your current level, drawabox too!
I can see that in your first pages you tried to keep away of the contour, but for the purpose of shading you still had to return to the outline.
Tben, what's the purpose of gesture? If to shade you just need the contour why should you waste time drawing lines that are not actually there?
Those three drawings in the end seem to be screaming this question to the heavens, where Proko and Marshall are watching you with a thin smile.
Here is the secret, gesture is the foundation but in between it and shading there is a step you may have missed and that is structure, meaning perspective.
If you haven't defined your forms clearly not only will you confuse the viewer, but you will also have a much harder time shading since you don't know how those surfaces are turning, bending and twisting in space,
Now, the big question is, HOW DO I GET THERE?
As you can see the gesture stickmen of Proko are not the sharpest tool in the shed, for one simple reason, they are very prone to the snowman effect due to the symmetrical use of line.
Now here is another way to approach gesture, instead of going for the great line of action immediately, you might want to slowly work down your way to it.
Starting from the head, go down the spine following the opposing curves of the neck, ribcage and-pelvis then down the weight bearing leg.
Now, which one might that be? Left or right? After all, most of us have two of them! Now here is the trick, look for the horizontal tilt of the pelvis, the side that sits higher will be the one keeping your body up and running.
During this process, try to keep the apex of your lines away from each other, they should lead the eye around down the flowing stream of the body. Now you can build over this basic scaffolding the main volumes of the ribcage and pelvis, while also attachin the other limbs.
To improve your understanding of volumes, Drawabox is a pretty good resources as it builds a good foundation in perspective improving your spatial reasoning skills!
If you squint you can see how your shading process is wrong. Don't lighten your darks and avoid darkening your lights as much as possible.
Since you aren't using any wrapping lines nor repeated lines beyond pure contour, shading is the only tool you are using to express change in [u]planes[/u].
Remember, different value=different plane. I can see you established the 2 value stage but things went awry from there as you basically kept your values to shallow greys instead of pushing your darks and [color=#ff2600]KEEPING YOUR LIGHTS LIGHT[/color] to clarify your initial choices.
The result is that your line art becomes less clear, losing the feeling of form and gesture you established pretty well through good proportions and linework. Maybe if you shaded the background and floor it would help establish more contrast, but it still won't save your figures.
Another huge problem is that you are using soft shadows as if it was the only type available to you, making the figures feel boneless, use hard strong shadows to convey the sense of structure, at least around bony landmarks.
The cast shadows on the ground too, suffer from the same problem. They should have sharp, clear outlines and be pitch black since there is no bounced light to make them softer.
A good exercise to improve your shading process is to draw sphere, cylinders and boxes on a table. Try it out with different angles for the light sources, first with just one object, then groups and try to see how they interact with one another!
Good work overall, you have a lot of room to improve since your beginning is already pretty good!
I was in the same slump, did tons of gesture drawings for a couple of months but it didn't really help me to draw the figure from imagination.
It was only after reading Michael Hampton's book that I realized the hidden patterns of the human body instead of going for the contour most of the times or a very flawed gesture.
The trick is really about capturing the spine's gesture, then every other mass follows. Head, Ribcage, Pelvis. Once you can feel the movement of the spine you can place them easily and believably on the page with just a few marks.
Then you can add wrapping lines to show the perspective and render whatever, but the foundation of everything is still your gesture.
I think you are pretty good but you could learn more by going for a more structural approach rather than using shading to show form immediately to avoid the vague cloudy effect of the woman's legs.
Try to break down forms into planes, front/back, sides, top/bottom this will help you shade more effectively too
