Can you critique my gesture drawings please? References included

Doing Proko's figure drawing course, references are from new masters academy life drawing sessions on youtube

• Reddish edited this post on September 11, 2023 7:50pm.

Hiiiiii!

Sorry I'm not up to the task to make a critic over your work but I am going to say that I love the fluency of your line of work.

Cheers my man!

Its looking great! You really know how to use only a few lines to capture the general shape of the figure, not focusing that much on anatomy, which is the correct thing to do.

The next time you do this, try to push shapes a little more, but remembering to keep feeling of the original pose. Keep an eye on the positioning of the body. For example, the one where the model is bent over. You exaggerated how the body curved up with the head pointed upwards, but doing so lessened how much her hips looked like they were sticking up in the air. For me, her hips dictated the flow of the entire body, so I feel it would have been more important to capture and emphasize then her turnt head, which is relatively small im comparison.

You really got a solid technique going! Keep up the great work!

I love to personality you captured.

Hello and welcome aboard, Reddish, and good morning. Say, you're doing a powerful job on exaggerating and caricaturing the gestures of the poses of your figures, from Proko, which I haven't gotten onto yet, but these poses all seem a bit too rigider in terms of the curves against straights. Will you kindly free up but lighten up your lines with our interactive drawing tutorial rrrright here?

The reason why you could and should do this tutorial is as a result, you could draw not just for art's sake, but for the thought systems from within. For most details, kinldy look into Drawing from the Artist Within and DRSB from Betty Edwards right there on Amazon.com.

My hat's off to you, so let's hope these make perfect sense.

First off, your drawings are phenomenal! Really stunning for the time frames of each (I assume that's what the numbers mean, the minutes spent on each). Secondly, I am not a native English speaker, and it is late, so I hope my meaning comes across clearly. Also, please keep in mind that this is only my opinion, and your art need only meet you own standard. Nobody else's.

That said, let's start the critique. I'll break my response into two: lines and perspective.

Lines: Specifically, your line's thickness and strength. Let's look at your top left drawing. When I look at it, my eyes are immediately drawn to where the lines are the thinkest and darkest: her hands and face. In addition, your lines are lightest on her legs, drawing the eyes away from them. Now, when I look at the reference picture for that, I see it differently. In my opinion, the hip and shoulder closest the the camera is most accentuated, and the back leg and hands are least relevant to the pose. This is, again, only my opinion, but I will put it out there for thought.

I would recommend using thinker lines in areas you want to bring the viewer's attention to, and softer lines in other areas. Use an eraser if needed, but it aught not to be.

Perspective: Specifically, foreshortening and viewpoint. Let's bring the attention to your bottom left drawing. It is a wonderful drawing, but it does not line up with the reference photo. In your drawing, is seems that the camera has taken the picture from a higher vintage point (for instance the hands, which is hidden in the picture yet shown in your drawing. As well as the knees, which is shown closer to the stomach than your drawing). Now, this isn't a bad thing. It can be a wonderful skill, to look at a picture and change perspective, if done intentionally. However, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

As a beginner artist myself, I have no advice exept to keep practicing. Take note of the negative space (the space around your subject, like the knees and stomach) and keep it in mind when drawing.

Overall though, it is well done for gesture drawings, and most of them easily convey what the subject is doing and where the line of action is.

Keep practicing. You're already well on your way to mastery.