Gesture critiques (most of these are were done in 2 to 3 minutes)

Hello, I've been using this site for almost three years now and I've been doing gestures/figures on and off. I plan on doing gestures all year and going forward. Here are some I've done for the last week or so now (these aren't all of the gestures I've done). I'm using a method to draw figures with straight lines only before moving on to using s and c curve lines. Any advice would be helpful!

https://imgur.com/a/Y4SZceS

Welcome aboard, Swampat, and welcome to our website. I'm Polyvios, Polyvios Animations. How do you do. Say, I think that you're very astute in terms of the technicality of the forces over the forms, spaces, and shapes of the figures. I feel that these lines are too timid to me yet. Would you like to please learn some highly new habits with our interactive drawing tutorial here, and some of this there, too.

You can and will be able to be completely clear about your artistic goals and aims, but your gesture drawing basics will become more loose but more honed with more grinding. I am not too sure about the grind part, but I think it practicing more quantitatively.

Good luck from me to you.

Hi Swampat. Looking at your sketches, my impressions:

a) you clearly understand the basics, and know what you are doing. Clean lines, beautiful shapes, systematic approach.

b) you are quite self-critical and systematically analyse your own drawings after the lesson. I should take quite a big bite from that myself.

c) my first kinda disagreement is the note to one of your figures: "Too slow", "Still too slow".

I think there are two different opinions about what the timed class feature should accomplish for an artist, the public one, which you obviously share, that it should teach an artist to draw gosh darn quicker, because speed will solve some qualities with lines? And mine, that this is a trap.

The timed feature helps to make sure you put more practice time into designing the first lines properly, and waste less time polishing turds by adding more detail to bad initial lines forever. It isn't supposed to make you draw quicker, but to focus more on practising first lines.

Like, the figure you critiqued as "too slow". I guess it took you somewhat above 3 minutes? Imagine you want to take that as basis for a full hour grande artwork. Will the final result look better, if you spent a few seconds less on the foundation?

d) I see way more people posting their artworks than people writing critiques. You are definitely at a level of accomplishment and understanding, that you could help some of the beginners way better than Polyvios or I can, and your systematic approach and analytical eye would also be interesting for more advanced students.

It also has a benefit for you, when the site mentions, that giving critiques to others offers you a new perspective and new approaches to advance your own art, that is absolutely true!

e) Your foundations are really good, I couldn't meaningfully tell you how to improve them.

But I know a way for you to find out! Break them! On purpose!

After you are done with a class, pick the foundation you like best, load up the image again, and then just keep working on that very image, add details, add shades, add background, whatever, until you either end up with a photorealistic masterwork ready for the art gallery, or more likely get to the point, where you clearly feel: "I don't know what the f I am doing. This drawing clearly looked better several minutes ago, and if I keep drawing, it will only become worse and worse."

Coming from that crisis point, you can come to conclusions, that no one else can give you by looking at your shorties. Either, you need to recherche some new theoretical backgrounds for the later steps (shadows are an entire science for themselves, and some crazy people even use colors!), or, you understand the steps going forward, but can't apply them to your foundation, because it doesn't properly indicate what you need for those advanced techniques. THEN you have found empirical data, what you need to improve with your foundations.

Yes, there are still some poses you occassionally struggle with, but I wouldn't wait until you mastered each and every possible pose, before taking a peek ahead into what you could develop your art into.

If you aren't looking for perfect high detail rendering as your ultimate goal, but rather want to be able to design your own poses from imagination, this would also be an opportune time to venture into that path, so you can learn, which exact aspirations your quick sketches have to satisfy to help you out in this area.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 22, 2023 2:28pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 22, 2023 2:50pm.

I'll make sure to check out that tutorial I forgot about it lol. As for my lines being timid, yeah I do get pretty overwhelmed while doing some of these gestures because I'm not super sure what kind of line I should be using. I'm trying to change the grip I'm using while I draw, hopefully will help me loosen up a bit.

• Swampat edited this post on December 22, 2023 3:48pm.

Hello Herbert!

Just wanted to say thank you for the more indepth critique!

You're the first person to tell me that I have an understanding of the basics. I've been doing gesture for a long bit now without posting for advice.

I like to put those little notes to help me remember what I'm struggling with. I usually can't see what I'm doing wrong, but for the stuff I can see, I'll put those notes to help me next time I do a gesture or any artwork.

When I mark down that I'm going too slow, I mostly mean that I'm taking too long to make a decision which makes me overthink my line placements and it makes me mess up the expressiveness of the gesture. After reading what you said, maybe I've been focusing on the speed thing too much... Maybe the reason I mess up those lines so often is because I'm stressing about how long a pose took me instead of really focusing on the quality and placement of those initial lines. Focusing too much on speed might be the reason I've been struggling for the last three years now.

I might try myself to critique others on here, it might help me learn more about drawing figures and maybe some other things I struggle with!

I've been a little nervous and lost about what I should be pursuing to learn. There are a lot of things I want to do, but I usually never feel that I'm ready to push myself to break rules. Maybe this year I'll start trying to take more risks with the stuff I've been learning. I want post more stuff for critiques on here and in other places going forward. I've mostly been learning on my own with very little outside opinions, so this has been an eye opener. I'm going to try taking your advice, maybe it'll benefit me more than I realize.

Well, don't be shy about critiqueing others. I am also not an art teacher, I only play one on the interwebs :)

But I think you got a lot of experience to share, and some to gain by sharing it.

I also dream a bit of turning this site into a lively place, where people actually dare to share their experiences, and debate them, and my life experience tells me, that such things only happen if you nudge people into what you hope them to do for you.

Hi Swampat!

To me, your lines and everything certainly look practiced and accomplished. I just started out practicing gestures and human anatomy, but some other of my stuff is already more practiced (just to give you an idea of my level).

Maybe just one thing would help you, a piece of advice that my painting teacher (of a casual student group) gives all the time: don't linger on one drawing, move on to the next! Embracing messiness, imperfection, playfulness can bring more fun into the process. Having joy in the weird, derpy sketches makes nothing be a failure. I second Aunt Herbert in that you perhaps would benefit from experimenting more, bending, stretching, imagining, telling stories. Mix up your process, or what you are going for, or maybe just the medium in which you work.

Regards,

Nin

Hi Swampat, it's Fabio here from Rome. Saw your sketches, I think I could not tell you anything on techinques since my drawing skills are less than half yours! I also practice gesture drawing daily, just to share with you my impressions I noted that you are using some kind of pen to draw these sketches, looks like some ink gel, is it correct? Have you ever tried these exercises using some brown tones pastels or even some graphite stick?Or do you think that for some reason it is better an ink pen?

Note that I ask you these questions also to learn something myself.

I have done gestures with a pencil, but I usually end up trying to fix mistakes for WAY too long and it causes me to focus on one figure. I use an fineliner pen in my sketchbook so I'm forced to accept my mistakes and move on. If I try to fix something and I make the same mistake that also enforces the idea of accepting my mistake and maybe trying to redraw the pose from scratch, or just moving on to a new pose.