I feel kinda lost?

Hey! I've been practicing gesture drawing for the past 3 months and I feel quite happy with my progress. I have been following Michael Hampton's book and youtube videos, and they have really opened my eyes into figure drawing and motion as a whole.

My goal from the very start with gesture drawing was to get really good at drawing the human body. In order to create any character I want from imagination. I just really want to master it.

Here is a short overview of my progress: https://imgur.com/a/UkHa3eh

I feel very proud of my progress and I have become more comfortable drawing gesture.

But now I feel kinda... Lost.

From what I've read, they say that I should start with construction and implement more 3d into my gestures, but I don't really know how or where to even start?

I've tried a bit as shown in the last image, but I really don't understand how to take the next step into transforming my gestures into actual 3d people, instead of just glorified stickmen lol.

I would really enjoy help on how I can improve my gesture drawing. But more importantly I would like help knowing what to do now/next?

Partially you are already there, partially you have to start a whole new chapter.

The part, where you are already there: you already extremely simplified your bodies, and you are already indicating parts of the body as voluminous objects in space. For example those circles around legs you already use. Draw an outline around that thing and call it a tube, voila, simple 3-D object.

The part with the reason, why you would consider calling your beautiful leg a silly tube, and the part with the new chapter: geometric objects are assumed to be easy to rotate around any axis. I am saying "assumed", because in reality it makes a lot of sense to actually practice that quite a bit. If you need ideas how to practice rotating geometric objects, I suggest a bit of a dive into drawabox.com, it's really good. The trick is for you to develop a set of useful building blocks, that a) you can substitute the body parts of your gesture drawings with, and b) you have practiced how to rotate.

The exact geometric forms actually vary from artist to artist. Some people only use cuboids, because they are easiest to rotate, with just right angles and straight lines to think about. Rotating a tube is already a bit more challenging, as you have to get a good grip on drawing ellipses in all sizes and with rotating axises, and getting an idea how to manipulate your ellipse to indicate that you are looking at a circular disk from a specific angle, but being able to use objects with round sides to indicate a human body let's you get so much closer to the original organic form, that the extra hazzle is worth it.

In the end, how simple or complicated you make those building blocks is up to you, the decisive quality is, whether you can rotate them around all axis. If you need inspiration, you can buy an artist's mascot of a human body, they are already made from quite simplified forms.

So, now you can substitute each part of the human body on your gesture drawings with an object, that you can easily rotate around any axis. Great. You can either rotate the whole body to switch your point of view, or you can just rotate a single limb around a joint to change the pose. Complete freedom at last. All that stands between you and that freedom is a **** load of torn hairs, sweat and tears when trying this nice theory out in practice.

My first experience with rotating a gesture: It took me about 5 minutes to draw a simplified gesture, with building blocks of my choice. 7 hours and half a drawing block filled with wild scribbles later, I managed to recreate approximately the same gesture, but viewed from a point of view, that had vertically shifted by 90 degrees. I congratulated myself on the success and swore to include rotating gestures as a fixture into my daily training, but so far resident trauma from that experience somehow always makes me skip to a more comfortable drawing practice, when gesture rotating is up. But it's totally a great idea, and I would immediately do it, if I wouldn't feel so tired right now. I'll do it tomorrow. Or at least the day after tomorrow, I promise....