30 min class

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GV41vN8xmFsoIfoQkcZWDGM1yNd5Ejsj/view?usp=sharing

Still trying to get comfortable with rhythm over contour as well as S lines.

I wasn't sure what to do with the 5 minute and 10 minute sessions; I found myself finishing a couple minutes early. What else should I focus on during the longer sessions? All I do is take more time to consider where I put my lines. I've also noticed that my proportions are off.

• Eteng edited this post on March 16, 2021 9:53pm.

The long poses of 5 and 10 minutes serve a whole bunch of purposes. They're your reward for your hard work. When most of us start out with figure drawing, a 5 or 10 minute drawing for a whole person feels short but doable. You know how you'd tackle it and what you'd do. And it's pretty common after a few classes of gesture drawing to find your old method feels stiff and lifeless... so then you have the challenge of how do you keep the lively effect of your gesture drawings, while achieving the good parts of your old method. And of course there's the question of what exactly is good with your old method...

This is also the part of a class where you can get really experimental in how you learn. Try a single line contour drawing in ink for 5 minutes. Try watercolor. Try a negative drawing. Break a person down into geometric forms. Draw the shadows rather than the person. Try all kinds of ideas and just go nuts with them. Take it to extremes that feel ridiculous. No one will care or grade you on it, so it's space to play.

It's also the section of class where you can strengthen your observation skills. You've got time to think. Maybe you can get a better gesture by giving yourself indications of where the head and feet go. Maybe you feel like the hands have a more important gesture than the body. Maybe a particular muscle movement feels as important as the spine.

As you keep going, you'll develop a range of methods for getting drawings you like and that feel lively in the 5 and 10 minute poses but the proportions, rhythm and sense of symmetry are better.

I'll also sometimes just... blow off the long poses. You're not cheating by doing 2 or 3 quick sketches and not pushing any farther if you have no idea where to go next. It doesn't mean you failed. You're allowed to be frustrated and confused.

That's some amazing work, eteng. They are amazing sketches because of how much I love the fluidity and life in these quick poses! Uh, I've looked at most of them as I browse through the photos I've duplicated, then rotated, and later, grayscaled, flipped, and rotated them. Their proportions are OK, but I think you're getting better at most of them. :)

Well, to answer your question, just to better improve your 5 and 10 minute figure drawings, would and could you please go with the, if you haven't already, the Learn to Draw interative tutorial in this website??

The reason why you could and should do this little tutorial is because, though the gesture part is more natural to you, then you would take lesser effort in the construction and relationships in the human forms.

If you really want to help yourself to totally understand the proportions and angles, be sure to please use these images here:
https://i.imgur.com/zhQsPOT.png
https://i.imgur.com/h8tdFRt.png

Although there are plenty of proportions still available on searches like DuckDuckGo and Google, they could and would be extremely and completely useful and concrete to your studies.

Good luck and my hat's off to you, and I hope you've found these helpful and informative.

Hello eteng,

I really like how deliberate your line work is - I can see you're experienced in making quick decisions which is necessary in gesture practices.

I think that defining the poses a little bit more could help! Try empahsizing/exaggerating what you think the S curve should be, and that should help better depict what exactly the subject is doing in each of the poses. This might even help with your execution of propotions.

You're doing a great job! I am working on things like capturing the line of action as well. Really impressed with your work.