My daily gesture drawings

Hi fellow artists,

After looking around on the site I was inspired to share some of my daily gesture drawings here. This used to be one of the aspects of drawing I struggled with the most, so I went on a journey to master it. During that journey I quickly fell in love with act of capturing the life of the human figure on paper and nowadays gesture drawing is one of my favourite activities.

Enjoy and any questions or comments are always welcome.

• Swen edited this post on August 28, 2019 12:48pm.

Awesome stuff man, inspiring in of itself :)

Thanks Ay.Spies :)!

Here are some more gesture drawings I did last week. I really enjoyed analysing these archery poses, especially the ones that I commented on. The notes are just a few of the thoughts that cross my head when I’m analysing the poses. Each pose is a whole story on itself. Observing and capturing the main events of a pose, those subtleties that make a pose interesting, is what excites me to do gesture drawings. Each drawing becomes an experience, like a roller coaster ride, leaving me in want for more once the ride ends.

Amazing, and such a nice variety. The the images you used for the gestures, don't suppose you can let me know where you got them? I like the idea of a set of gestures like your set of archers for example.

Thanks again for the kind words. I collect reference images on pinterest, but originally they're from deviantart: http://senshistock.deviantart.com/art/Female-Archer-Pack-3-Pose-Reference-339470906

Thanks a bunch for the link!

Very nice! What time interval did you use for these?

Thank you Kim :). If you are referring to the archery poses, the ones for which I did not write down a time interval took around 8 minutes.

Great work Swen.
Really impressive form and beautiful rhythm.

Thank you plwoodcomics!

These are some drawings from today's session.

Your gestures look great Swen! I'm kind of curious to see what your 30 second gestures look like, do you draw those too? From a first glance I've only noticed 60 seconds or more so far. (If you don't draw those that's fine of course! Is there a particular reason why not? I feel I could learn a whole lot from you!)

Thank you Sanne! Each session is learning experience for me.

I used to do them a lot in the past but nowadays I don't do 30 sec poses that often. I'm pasting a post I made on another forum that may answer your question:

To me, the goal of gesture drawing is to analyse, experience and capture the action that the figure (or any living being) is performing.

In many cases I’ve seen the goal of gesture drawing being reduced to drawing a pose fast. While practising to capture an action in a short period of time (30 seconds, 1 minute etc.) surely has its benefits, consider that gesture drawing is defined by the intent of the drawing, not by how fast the drawing is done. I’ve encountered many artists who thought that if they were not able to nail a pose in 30 seconds, they were not good enough. In turn, this mindset also transferred to their imagination drawings, resulting and frustration. In doing character design, I invest a lot of time and thought into a character's pose. Sometimes up to an hour. The pose needs to convey character. If it doesn't, it doesn't matter how fast you drew it.

Gesture drawing should be about experiencing and understanding how the body is functioning to perform a particular action. And this simply takes time. Especially when dealing with complex poses or multiple figures, I’ve found that just spending 30 seconds or 1 minute on the drawing does not allow me to extract enough information to apply to my drawings from imagination. So my advice is to balance your gesture drawing exercises with both short (30 seconds, 1-3minutes) and long (5-10min) time intervals. The shorter time intervals should help you to see and capture the big picture while the longer intervals allow you to focus more on the nuances of an action. Again, keep in mind that the goal should be to analyse, experience and understand what is happening with the figure, not trying to copy it as fast as you can. Imbuing this experience and understanding into your own drawings is what will make them truly come alive instead of being just a bunch of lines on a surface.

If you have further questions feel free to ask :).

Thank you, that is an excellent answer I will keep in mind for the future! :)

Your thoughts on what gesture drawing is for are very much in line with ours, Swen. Love to see that.

@Sanne: I'm glad to hear that the information was useful :).

@Kim: That's great indeed!

I gave myself a challenge again today with this sequence of actions.