gesture drawings - 0724

These take a while to put together, and to do this everyday would be pretty overwhelming, so I think I'll upload gesture drawings on a weekly basis.

There's a looooot of rambling. It's pretty much a watered-down stream of consciousness of most of the stuff I've learned related to this. I think afterwards, I won't say as much. It'll probably just be small things here and there that I learn from each week.

I thought I should post some gesture exercises. I try to do them every day -- 25 pictures, 30 seconds each. Eventually, I started to start with warmups which consist of drawing lines and elipses. I found out about it in an article. It's part of a series called "How to Practice Drawing". Super good.



I plan on doing these daily, so hopefully I'll have five each week.
Here's today's for now:

I use posemaniacs's 30 second pose... thing. The advice that they have on that page is really helpful.

They're not great by any stretch of the imagination. Some of them, I can barely tell what kind of form they're supposed to take. ;u; But it's good for getting me to relax, and it helps me to cultivate a certain mindset and approach. Drawing actually stresses me out, because I want everything to be perfect. These gesture exercises are helpful, because they don't need to be perfect, and so I can take on a better approach by considering other things (things I learned from old classes):

• drawing = mark making
• instead of drawing the outline of the object, capture its form and essence
• You can do this by getting only the important parts that make up the pose. Your mind is able to fill in the blanks trough the way in which the mark relates to the blank space. That's where the "edges" come from.
• So, try to achieve the shape in as few lines as possible. Just get the important parts of the form. When you relate a mark to empty space, you get a shape. Those are the "edges" of an object.
• Look at it like a blob. What's its shape?

Interestingly, the same strokes that I used while warming up with the lines and elipses were used during the gesture exercises. It really does help you draw more efficiently, so I highly recommend trying the line and elipse warmups too. And whatever else that guy included in his article. ;;

It feels really good to get the initial shape down and then be able to go back and refine the details, because by that point, you capture a general understanding of the body, and so you kind have a better understanding of how the details contribute to the whole body.

The more you do it -- and consistently -- the more you understand. But, you also have to be really, really observant. I think that's a huge part of drawing, since drawing is just an interpretation of reality. You have to have a good understanding of what reality looks like in order to draw your own interpretation of it. Try to learn something new each time, even if it's really little. Posemaniacs is great, because you can actually see the muscles, and it helps you visualize the body pretty well.

Both my drawing and life drawing professors would describe drawing as dancing. A continuous motion, almost like scribbles. Also, long, purposeful strokes are good. Like, tracing over the whole form.

If you drew traditionally, like with charcoal or pencil, this would require your whole arm. This is really good for your wrist. You don't want to restrict movement to your wrist up, which can happen if you zoom out too much and make really small, meticulous marks. I find myself doing this during my warmups, and notice that my hand tenses up. That's why it's better to make larger strokes.  Since I drew digitally, I had to accomodate. I think there's an article on the internet somewhere about how to hold your stylus the right way so that you don't have injuries later on, but I'll have to find it... What I did was sit back, as opposed to leaning too closely to the screen, so that my arm is able to extend more. It was bent at a little larger than 90 degrees. Not sure if that's helpful, but...

I think, one thing that really helped me understand the "mark making" thing, or capturing the form of something, were these exercises that we did where we took charcoal and blocked in the shadows of a still life. You weren't allowed to draw the still life, much in the way that we typically understand the action of drawing. You were only allowed to shade. It was really cool, because in the end, you could make out what your drawing was supposed to be. If I have any old pictures laying around, I'll post some. I might even try that exercise again someday.

Another thing that was really helpful was my computer graphics class. I learned maya about a year ago, and it was an interesting approach to making things. You started from large to small, so you would make a shape, and then cut and extrude until you had your object. In this way, you really had to break ordinary objects down into simple shapes, and because you were making a 3D object, you also had to think in 3D and consider all sides. I think this also applies to whatever vector images you make in illustrator, because instead of just drawing stuff, you have to think in shapes, since you're constructing much of the object out of shapes.

I know that most of this stuff won't be too fun to read, so I might try to illustrate these things in a separate blog post some day. I feel like... I wouldn't want to read all of this or would just get confused, since it's all words and no visuals. ;;;

Anyway, happy Friday!