Forum posts by Swen

Here are some more. I'm learning a lot about the mechanics of the body from these, especially that there is an intention behind each action of the human body. An artist's ability to capture that intention makes the difference between a figure/character that looks dead and one that looks alive.

Hi Joshua,

In addition to what JeremyA and Ay.Spies said, keep in mind that drawing a good head depends on your ability to construct form. You need to study and understand the anatomy of the head, starting with its bone structure, proportions and planes. Otherwise your head drawings will end up looking like egg shapes with some features attached to them. Andrew Loomis' head drawing book is a good place to start.

@Sanne: I'm glad to hear that the information was useful :).

@Kim: That's great indeed!

I gave myself a challenge again today with this sequence of actions.

Thank you Sanne! Each session is learning experience for me.

I used to do them a lot in the past but nowadays I don't do 30 sec poses that often. I'm pasting a post I made on another forum that may answer your question:

To me, the goal of gesture drawing is to analyse, experience and capture the action that the figure (or any living being) is performing.

Gesture drawing should be about experiencing and understanding how the body is functioning to perform a particular action. And this simply takes time. Especially when dealing with complex poses or multiple figures, I’ve found that just spending 30 seconds or 1 minute on the drawing does not allow me to extract enough information to apply to my drawings from imagination. So my advice is to balance your gesture drawing exercises with both short (30 seconds, 1-3minutes) and long (5-10min) time intervals. The shorter time intervals should help you to see and capture the big picture while the longer intervals allow you to focus more on the nuances of an action. Again, keep in mind that the goal should be to analyse, experience and understand what is happening with the figure, not trying to copy it as fast as you can. Imbuing this experience and understanding into your own drawings is what will make them truly come alive instead of being just a bunch of lines on a surface.

If you have further questions feel free to ask :).

Thank you plwoodcomics!

These are some drawings from today's session.

Your drawings are looking pretty good! I look forward for more to see if there are any specific areas you can improve on. Keep it up!

Hey Joshua,
Your consistency and dedication is admirable! After looking through your drawings on deviantart I can say that you are definitely practicing the right things. So WHAT you’re are practicing is right. To reach the next level, however, you’ll have to pay more attention on the execution of these exercises.

The most important aspect of drawing to pay attention to is line. Since line is what you’re going to use to create everything else in drawing, your ability to control your line work will affect everything else. So it is important to spend time practicing line control. You should be able to draw both straight and curved lines quite well without the aid of any kind of ruler. You should lock your wrist and draw from the shoulder using your whole arm. This is especially crucial for drawing straight lines, otherwise they will end up looking wobbly. (You can watch a demonstration of this in this video, starting around the 7th minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3lApsNmdwM)

On the most basic level you should practice drawing straight lines, curves and ellipses and be able to draw them well! Your circles for examples should actually look like circles, and drawing from the shoulder making a circular motion with your pencil will help you get them right.

For the cubes, the lines need to be straight and executed with one stroke instead of little scratchy ones. Also watch out for distortion. The lines need to converge properly according to their vanishing points. The cubes should really be drawn as tight as what you would see in reality.
Mastering line control and drawing basic geometric forms in perspective will in turn improve your figure drawings. The figure is a complex form existing in a 3D space after all.

Sure Kim, thanks for asking.

Rhythm is essentially a regular, repeated pattern. In the context of the figure rhythm occurs in a repeated pattern of alternating ‘C’ curves. This pattern is what I was referring to. Any pose can be broken down into its own rhythms.

On an abstract level, rhythm is what really creates a sense of energy and movement in a pose. I attached a page from one of my tutorials in which I illustrated what I’m talking about. I hope this helps :).

You're welcome JeremyA. Keep in mind that improvement doesn't come by just drawing. You need to spend time acquiring knowledge about the fundamentals also.

Thanks for the notification Kim, this should solve it.

Thank you Kim :). If you are referring to the archery poses, the ones for which I did not write down a time interval took around 8 minutes.

Thanks again for the kind words. I collect reference images on pinterest, but originally they're from deviantart: http://senshistock.deviantart.com/art/Female-Archer-Pack-3-Pose-Reference-339470906

Thanks Ay.Spies :)!

Here are some more gesture drawings I did last week. I really enjoyed analysing these archery poses, especially the ones that I commented on. The notes are just a few of the thoughts that cross my head when I’m analysing the poses. Each pose is a whole story on itself. Observing and capturing the main events of a pose, those subtleties that make a pose interesting, is what excites me to do gesture drawings. Each drawing becomes an experience, like a roller coaster ride, leaving me in want for more once the ride ends.

Hi Jeremy, I hope this helps :).