feel so lost with gesture drawing

I've seen so many video tutorials and they all say the same thing which is capture the movement and I'm just here like ??? cause that really doesnt explain much and i dont even know what theyre supposed to look like

and i did the 15 minute tutorial as well but i dont even know if did it right when i got to the 5 min under drawing part

this is what it looked like:

and also how long should be spending with gesture drawing and what other stuff should i be focusing towards with or after it?

Good morning,Rotiobakar, and welcome to your first time in Line of Action. How do you do? Upon looking at this figure pose, I'd say that your very-first attempt is postively and absolutely on the right track. Greater job on your first attempt, so please keep on pushing yourself smarter but harder.

However, your first ever pose seems a bit too rigider and stiffer in terms of the lines and lines of action above. How would you like to solidify and loosen up your lines and edges of action and rhythm and tempo with your first ever 2 minute pose, while being much more than nicer to yourself, except you can and shall enjoy yourself and the process. The two reasons why is because of two reasons: First, to be lesser than concerned about purer perfectionism, but being more concerned about the rawer vitality and energy in your drawn lines or shapes; And second, to have fun and more fun, and even more fun with the journey to be the greater master of sketch art in your own way. Thanks for listening, but I'm sorry if I'd waffled on a bit far too much.

If you're curious about more about loosening your organic shapes and geometric shapes, as applied to gesture drawing, look at these two videos below:

Please take those two vids with a much, much more smaller grain of salt. Hope these have been extremely and absolutely useful, helpful and encouraging.

I think gesture drawing is extremely difficult to grasp. I would suggest learning about human anatomy first. I understand that gestures might be confusing if you do not know how different body parts affect each other. I would definitely recommend learning about plastic anatomy. The amount of information may be overwhelming, so don't try to understand everything all at once. It's easier to understand the bones when you're learning about the muscles and how they attach to them, so you don't need to start by learning about the bones. When you can draw the human body and its muscles confidently, you can return to gesture drawing to remove stiffness from your studies and add life and energy to them. You don't need to hurry. Everything comes in time. Of course, my response is simply a suggestion, and the ultimate decision is up to you. Anyway, I encourage you to look up more information on these topics and develop your own approach to learning.

To give some good tips.

You don't want to copy the person your drawing, you want to copy their movements which might sound weird but a good way to get use to it is use a singular line to demonstrate the leg being straight, or two lines to show a bend in the elbow or knee.

Paper is just a means for you to get better don't be afraid to use all of your paper for 2-4 gestures, go out and buy a 500 Count copy paper stack for $7-10 and use the full paper. This is all for you to gain experience and you don't want to stay drawing small.

A big one that helped me is learning to hold your pencil in a grip that forces you to use your whole shoulder; so overhand Getting use to over-hand grip . This can allow you to do blunt broad strokes that can start pushing you into looser strokes. Only drawback is that using your shoulder feels wrong and hard to do when you start using it at first but it becomes so natural overtime and beneficial for so much more.

You will get frustrated. I should know, I started off my gestures as the same as yours wondering, "why do they look so round?", "What am i doing wrong?", or "i'm ass" but the way i got past it was by looking at gestures on this site or 30 second gesture videos that were better than me and just analyzing why they use certain lines, draw with them, and then practice on my own.

Get a feel for using less lines to draw with (example: using one line to show the back and a leg being straight. Or using one line to show an arm being extended in the air going down the back to a curved leg)

This is all that helped me but we are all different and find usually only certain part of tips to be most beneficial.

Experiment and have fun!

I don't know what happened but my reply just disappeared??

Anyway, just to give you an idea. You know when you are on a lecture and want to remember what's being said. You don't write down whole sentences because you don't have time for that. Instead you grab a few words and put them down so that later you will remeber by just reading those few words.

Gesture drawing is a bit like that but with shapes instead of words. In gesture drawing you take down "notes" so that later you can look at it and see what the pose was. You can use the gesture drawing to make a more detailed drawing later if you want to but the gesture drawing does not need details. For some reason the long flowing lines (line of action) are the most effective when doing gesture drawing. Have a look at Proko on you tube. He explains it well.

• Thestripper edited this post on February 22, 2023 5:27pm.