Forum posts by Andrew

Very good start.

I would recommend, however, your gestures be less about constructive anatomy, and more capturing the pose and the movement. Check out Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaides. I guarantee that doing the rapid scribbly gestures that he suggests, your natural eye for proportion, perspective, and rhythm will develop very quickly.

I would also highly recommend a gesture exercise from Experimental Drawing by Robert Kaupelis. He was very much in the same school of thought of Kimon Nicolaides, so both textbooks fit well together. In this beginning gestural exercise, Mr. Kaupelis has the student do gestures in groups of twenty. You start with 5 sec then 10 sec and so on until you get to 1 min or even 5 min. With surprisingly little practice, you can get an incredible about of information in the 5 or 10-sec gesture. Which is fantastic to know when you are attempting to gather sketches in public.

Keep up the good work!

I am with Jason on this. If you focus on the gesture, you will quickly gain an natural sense of the models proportion. Because as you focus on the action, your eye will automatically gauge the forms proportions.

If you focus on proportions, especially in the shorter quick sketches, you can easily lose the perspective and the figure will look distorted.

First off, there is no right or wrong way to sketch.

But you do need to be conscious of what you want out of a sketch. Some people want or need more of a rendered sketch, and to the other extreme there are the scribblers and the tonalists. The rest of fall in the middle somewhere. Personally, I am a scribbler from way back, my sketchbooks are filled in a short hand that is only vaguely discernible by anyone else, but provides me with enough information to come back and elaborate on the subject later in a drawing or painting. Some are more elaborate than other, depends greatly on how familiar I am with the subject, and whether I am going for a study or information sketch or a more general concept sketch.

That said, if you want to practice constructive anatomy, then pick up a book by Bridgeman, Loomis,or Hogarth, and start by practicing their drawings, than apply that to life or the reference works so graciously provided here. If you want to be more organic, then step back from the construction lines, and spend hours working on the gesture. I would recommend a fluid, scribble gesture as Kimon Nicolaides discusses in his book Natural Way to Draw. Your pencil (or pen or crayon), never leaves the page, and you build up the form and the action. Your first ones will be horrible, but quickly you will develop an natural rhythm and the proportions will become second nature.

Good luck