Recent gesture drawings - looking for critiques

Hi all,

I've been doing daily gesture practice for 11 days. I want to keep this up and improve a lot.

Here's what I'm doing:

1. I'm watching the Proko figure drawing course on YouTube and doing the assignments

2. Doing daily Croquis Cafe sessions

3. And 20 minutes of 30 second poses on LoA (not every day but most days).

Here are my gestures from my two most recent Croquis Cafe sessions:

https://imgur.com/a/zGDPq4W

The Croquis Cafe gestures are 5x1min poses, 4x2min poses and then 1x5min pose. I've numbered them on the page.

Please let me know your critiques! Am I doing anything right? At the moment I feel like I'm not sure where to focus or what the big problems are.

I try to go back to my previous gestures and make notes on what to improve, but I think it really helps to have others look :)

Thanks in advance!

I personnally think you are doing very well! I like your approach with the "bean" shape to help form the chest and torso area. My one suggestion would to work on your proportions, some of them are a litte wonky (its ok, thats one of things im really trying to improve too!) I would just suggest to take a little more time on proportions and they would improve a lot. Also, I really love the way your scetches look so clean! all the lines are very nice and "crisp" hope this helps a little!

I really love all your humaniod gestures, aero, love them! Yet, here's my critique: I love how bold and powerful with your gestural drawn communications, however, I see that you'd drawn one of the legs and one of the figures too big. Thanks for your honest self-critique. If that's part of your drawing style, that's OK. Why don't you slim down on one of the legs in Drawing #3 (1m), in 30 minutes of 2m sketches, pretty, pretty please, please?? The warrant why is because, your forces, forms, and details will look and feel more forceful and powerful in terms of perspective, in how and why you could communicate them that way. Hope and pray that it'll come to fruition.

Polyvios Animations

Thank you Hannah! I really appreciate you taking the time to critique :)

I definitely need to work on proportions more. In fact I've never really studied proportion, I just started with gesture drawings and the forms sometimes look proportionately OK, and other times not...

So I'll find some resources and make sure I really understand proportion, and apply those to my future gestures.

Thanks again!

Thank you Polyvios!

Hannah also mentioned proportion is probably what I should focus on getting better at, so I'll do that :)

I'll try the 30 minutes of 2 minute gesture drawings - 1 minute is probably too short for me right now to get the proportions right. Let me know if that's what you meant.

Thanks!

As someone who's only been drawing 2 years, half a year of serious practice really, my advice is limited and a bit suspect. I think though you've got the first rules in gesture down. Capture the gesture flow, don't get caught up in the details, make it dynamic. Each of these gestures has more life and flow than a super detailed store manikin, a good sign you've got your priorities straight. From what I've heard and read, starting with hip torso relationship is the first an most important step, as everything flows from there and is balanced by it. If proportion and scaling is giving you trouble, keep the head, hips, and torso in mind. Arms, legs, and the head all have relation to them, so if something seems off, check how they're connected to see if anythin is out of scale or off balance. When just doing gesture, it's more intuitive and practical than doing hard measurements and scaling. Doing that at the beginning can risk making your drawing stiff and boring, and best saved in the later drafting and correction phases. Just a suggestion, I've been reading Michael. Matessi's force method to capture force in my gesture drawings, and he's got a bunch of books, videos, and even courses on the subject. Just throwing that out there, nice work!

Thanks Psychicdan for the advice! I really appreciate it. I've heard of the force method but never tried it, so I'll look into that.

Hi!

It's very interest how you apply geometric and dinamic shapes in the sketches. I think that practice all learn about proportions and synamic line on figure drawing.

Hello Aero, loving the name, and the gesture drawings.

For 30 seconds, I'd say you're doing really well at capturing the gesture, and you're simplification is really cool! You seem to have a good understanding of weight and force, now I'd recommend studying more on building your shapes, as they can be very tricky to capture at first but you'll soon get the hang of it. Try studying for longer, starting with your gesture and then working out the simple shapes first, using the head to measure the proportion. The tricky part of this is you need to balance accuracy with gesture and flow. You'll get there though, your work is looking very nice :)

Great work Aero!

You've managed to consistently capture a lot of energy in these sketches, very nice! However, there is still some stiff qualities that I noticed, specifically in the shoulders. I like to bein my figure drawings by starting with the shape of the shoulders. Considering things like: do they droop down, do they curl up in a 'u' shape, does one lay slightly higher/lower from the other? Additionally, doing this gives me a good landmark to work with when considering proportions.

Good work, hope this helps.

Nice work. I would recommend focusing more on capturing the bigger shapes and angles in the figures and less on the individual lines of body parts. It looks like in the 5 minute drawing, you allowed a little more time for finding the underlying shapes before fleshing out the lines, and somewhat in the torso parts of the shorter drawings, which is great. I'd try to do that more for the extremities on the shorter drawings as well, and don't be afraid to let those drawings end up looking more like collections of shapes without a clear outline, rather than outlines that don't show as much volume.

Thanks everyone for your feedback!

I've done a lot since 10th June and tried to incorporate your feedback so I'll post some of my new figures within the next week.

Hi everyone,

I'm now on day 23 of gesture study and wanted to share some progress: https://imgur.com/a/EsbP6Gf

You all had really helpful advice! I'm not sure if I should have created a new/separate thread - I'll leave it here for now.

I just happened to do the same croquis cafe session as the one I uploaded in my last imgur link (https://imgur.com/a/zGDPq4W) so I think it's a pretty good comparison.

I'm getting better at letting the 30 second gestures be loose and just about finding a flow.

I'm not really sure where to go with the longer gestures - in the 5 min gesture in this session I started adding some structure because I'm also practicing the robobean from proko and wanted to try applying it here.

Let me know if you have any other feedback :)