Recent session critique!

Started back up here after a bit, feel I'm a little rusty on my gestures, and would like a few more eyes on these two :)

https://imgur.com/a/cakEQn8

Hello!

Your proportions look pretty good to me :)

If you can, it may be better to do your gestures on paper rather than digitally - digital is convenient, but on paper you usually have more space to spread out and can use more of your arm. I think that would help you a lot and that loosening up would help you get back into it. Something like thick charcoal or graphite can feel really powerful and freeing, just nice overall to make some big strokes, which in turn (for me at least) makes more fluid motion.

If you're looking for something more specific to focus on, I'd say trying to think about the forms and shapes of the figure - thinking more 3d rather than 2d (though I suppose that's pretty general too).

Best wishes!

OK, first one, and I don't know how important that is for you, but what you are doing is more a mix of gesture and form than pure gesture study. I do the same, so that isn't a horrible flaw, just an observation and a bit of nitpicking about language. A purely gestural analysis would be an almost exclusively linear study of the tensions and balance in the figure. Which in a puristic form often doesn't even look so good, because it doesn't convey form or perspective. If you are interested in separating gesture and form, Michael Hampton does it a lot, but be warned, he also purposefully deviates a lot from observation, and his results seem sometimes rather losely inspired by reference than drawn from reference.

A very specific point on the kneeling male figure in the second image, and that is about the position of the head. It is quite distinctly above the shoulders, which looks awkward. This specific model, and others with that body type, often has his head sitting rather low between the shoulders, with the neck more diagonal or even leaning towards horizontal rather than straigt up vertical, and the face extended forward over the chest. I also think you drew the hip too high, shortening the upper body and giving the legs a strange rabbit-like tension.