Forum posts by Swampat

Hello, I think you should try learning how to draw from your shoulder and arm to help with your scratchy lines. I used to do my figures like how you do yours about two years ago. This video gives some good practicing methods to help you get used to moving your shoulder and arm while drawing

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Outside of that, I think when you draw these figures you should focus on the flow and gesture of the figures instead of trying to be super accurate right now. There are lots of videos on how to practice gesture drawing, I'd link you one but none of them personally worked for me specifically.

Hello,

It's been about 2 months since I last posted any gestures/figures here. I've been trying to structure my practice better for the last two months, but I have been doing a lot of gestures while trying to figure myself out. Here's a few I decided to do digitally, any critiques are appreciated.

https://imgur.com/a/BfXYBex

I have done gestures with a pencil, but I usually end up trying to fix mistakes for WAY too long and it causes me to focus on one figure. I use an fineliner pen in my sketchbook so I'm forced to accept my mistakes and move on. If I try to fix something and I make the same mistake that also enforces the idea of accepting my mistake and maybe trying to redraw the pose from scratch, or just moving on to a new pose.

Hello Herbert!

Just wanted to say thank you for the more indepth critique!

You're the first person to tell me that I have an understanding of the basics. I've been doing gesture for a long bit now without posting for advice.

I like to put those little notes to help me remember what I'm struggling with. I usually can't see what I'm doing wrong, but for the stuff I can see, I'll put those notes to help me next time I do a gesture or any artwork.

When I mark down that I'm going too slow, I mostly mean that I'm taking too long to make a decision which makes me overthink my line placements and it makes me mess up the expressiveness of the gesture. After reading what you said, maybe I've been focusing on the speed thing too much... Maybe the reason I mess up those lines so often is because I'm stressing about how long a pose took me instead of really focusing on the quality and placement of those initial lines. Focusing too much on speed might be the reason I've been struggling for the last three years now.

I might try myself to critique others on here, it might help me learn more about drawing figures and maybe some other things I struggle with!

I've been a little nervous and lost about what I should be pursuing to learn. There are a lot of things I want to do, but I usually never feel that I'm ready to push myself to break rules. Maybe this year I'll start trying to take more risks with the stuff I've been learning. I want post more stuff for critiques on here and in other places going forward. I've mostly been learning on my own with very little outside opinions, so this has been an eye opener. I'm going to try taking your advice, maybe it'll benefit me more than I realize.

I'll make sure to check out that tutorial I forgot about it lol. As for my lines being timid, yeah I do get pretty overwhelmed while doing some of these gestures because I'm not super sure what kind of line I should be using. I'm trying to change the grip I'm using while I draw, hopefully will help me loosen up a bit.

• Swampat edited this post on December 22, 2023 3:48pm.

Hello, I've been using this site for almost three years now and I've been doing gestures/figures on and off. I plan on doing gestures all year and going forward. Here are some I've done for the last week or so now (these aren't all of the gestures I've done). I'm using a method to draw figures with straight lines only before moving on to using s and c curve lines. Any advice would be helpful!

https://imgur.com/a/Y4SZceS