Daily Gesture Practice

Heres my daily gesture practice. Not really worrying about proportions but am generally looking for an overall flow. Any tips on what to do with hands and feet to simplify them, specifically when they are bending or segments are far apart.

30 sec:

2 min:

• Vvalverde edited this post on June 10, 2019 9:47pm.
• Vvalverde edited this post on June 13, 2019 5:23pm.

If that 2 minute session was comfortable to do, I’d suggest trying a 1h class mode instead. If it wasn’t comfortable or was built up over a couple sessions, try a 30 minute class or a Croquis Café class.

See, class format is very old and we keep it around for good reasons. There’s reasons so many drawing tools offer class mode! Starting off with short drawings and gradually building up to longer pushes you and you don’t have time to settle into a pattern with anything. It also serves as a warm up for your observation skills. And the long pose at the end should feel a lot easier and stronger than anything you can do cold. There might be a place for long series of very short poses, but it’s not a great thing for someone new to gesture drawing. It doesn’t give that feeling of building up to success.

Also, a lot of how we learn is we repeat things that work. Class mode gives a lot of opportunity to find a trick that works and apply it. And you get to find the limits. How far can I go? Where does it stop working?

As far as hands and feet, scribbled square/rectangle shapes will get you far. Not nice tidy ones for a first gesture. Scribbles! It’s actually good if they’re wonky and have curvy bits or wiggles or funny points. Just scribble, and to start rate your drawing on whether you included all visible hands and feet or not. If you get to the point where it feels easy to include hands and feet in your shortest drawings, then you should have a good feeling for what scribble works for specific hand and foot gestures. And you should have bits where you’ve tried to go further with hands and feet, or maybe you have tried classes focused on just them.

Today's gesture practice. I tried doing the 1 hour class course and I kind of liked it. I'm used to doing 10 minute of 30 sec gesture poses then 50 minutes of 2 minutes poses. I feel I get more practice out of the raw 50 minutes of 2 minute poses as it lets me look closer at the simple shapes. I honestly got a bit lost when I started the 10 minute one since I'm not sure how much more concise I should get in the form.

• Vvalverde edited this post on June 13, 2019 5:22pm.

Wow very well done. Proportions look great as well as natural movement

I feel like this comment is excessively harsh, but I’m not quite sure how to tone it down. You’re getting pretty much how I’d grade this class if it were mine. Try to hold on to the feeling that you did a new thing, and you did a challenging and difficult thing and you finished it while you read what follows.

You didn’t get hands and feet in most of the 30s poses in the class session. So if hands and feet are a priority, that part of the session was a failure. They’re good for 30s poses just... they don’t meet the goal. 30s poses often don’t meet the goal, if you are getting 100% here it’s time to think about new goals.

You got them in a few of the 1m poses, but it feels like you’re obsessing over fingers and toes. They’re a detail, like eyes. If you can get in a smudge or scribble to convey an important finger gesture, great, but not at the expense of the overall figure?

The 5 minute poses I think all have their hands and feet and it looks like you got some good observation before diving into shading. These are probably the strongest observation for the time in this session? One of these two probably gets rated as the best for the session. These are the ones I’d sit with most to think about what went right.

The 10m pose I find it somewhat implausible that there’s no hint of the other leg/foot at any point in the image. That’s not usually how bodies work. So something got weird. What, I dunno. It’s really really hard to get a pose where a major body part like a leg is entirely hidden, even if you have the help of a draped fabric prop. If it were me, this is probably where I started feeling really tired.

The 25m pose you got in 2 good foot structure studies, tho it feels like the observation of foot muscles kinda stops at the ankles. Remember that muscles never anchor within a joint. Muscles link two bones. And gesture is showing what moves, which is mostly muscles. So if you use a joint as a cutting off point it will feel weird. It seems like most of your time was spent on the torso. If you’re more interested in torso muscles than hands and feet, that’s fine. If the goal is hands and feet, not so much? And if your goal is the overall gesture, also not so much. The hands are notably weaker than the feet, so your level of detail is not as consistent in this as in the 5m poses.

Here's today's practice. I didn't feel I did quite as well on the 5 minute poses but I felt generally better about the 10 and 25 minute ones. The main problem I faced this time were the eyes, specifically because I don't like to zoom when doing the practice so I'm not quite sure how to get the detail when it's relatively small. This also correlates to when I draw hands and feet on a smaller scale as I sometimes tend to bloat the fingers and toes.

• Vvalverde edited this post on June 13, 2019 5:22pm.

Today's practice. Didn't really feel it today. I specifically had trouble with the 10 minute drawing, as the model's frame was relatively slender and her pose closed so I had trouble making the gesture dynamic. Should I have exaggerated the overall form more? I also didn't feel that well about the 25 minute pose. Tips and suggestions would be highly helpful.

• Vvalverde edited this post on June 13, 2019 5:21pm.

Today felt much better than yesterday. I decided to change the color to a deep sky blue to try to trick my brain to not get overly attached and I think it might have helped. This time around I also tried to concentrate more on the gesture of the gesture, finding the simple shapes that the appendages make to make it easier when I'm trying to get everything proportionally correct and within proper distance of each other.

• Vvalverde edited this post on June 13, 2019 5:21pm.

What do you feel is *good* about the 25m pieces? What parts are right? The more you dislike a piece, the more important that question is. If you have a strong reaction, there‘s something there.

Today's practice felt the most consistent and fluid. After looking through some of Swen's early practice pieces I took notice of how he dealt with hands and feet which generally helped. However, I ran into a problem when drawing where the timer suddenly started counting down much faster than it should have, nearly twice as fast. Does anyone know what caused this, and how to turn it off?

Today's practice. Kind of happy I got to practice another 25 min pose of a male, I applied some of the tips people gave me to exaggerate ever so slightly the gesture and I feels cohesive and not blocky. Any more critique would be appreciated.

For your 5 min poses, I think the major difference between the two in quality is you don’t have a method in mind for getting fast dark shadows, so you had to waste a lot of time on the second figure trying to convey a sense of space/volume and the proportions suffered. The foreshortening in the pose might also have been an issue? Your strongest poses are ones where you can mostly convey shadows with line weight and that second pose it would have been a nightmare to do with just line weight.

It looks like you’re getting pretty consistent about getting hands and feet in already. Do you still feel like those need work?

And I think the way you’re approaching gesture right now is working, you’re getting a lot of good drawings out of a session.

I'm a bit confused on what you mean by fast dark shadows.

As for the hands and feet, I looked through other people's drawings for quick sketch feet and some proko video's for the hands so I'm starting to get used to it; it is a bit difficult from certain angles still though.

Today's practice. Overall, eh. Any and all critique would be appreciated

I'm starting to reach the point where I'm worried that I'm not progressing. I notice in previous drawings the similar gesture of the same photo and that it turned out better in the previous version, making me worry that I'm in fact not retaining what I've learned and, in turn, regressing. The only thing I feel I might be getting slightly better on are feet and hands, but even then it's a mixed bag.

Regardless any critique would be encouraged and appreciated.