Gesture Drawing Practise

When trying to draw gestures better, I started watching films and animations and then pausing them at interesting pose points. I wanted to try and start to work out how the body moved and how weight was distributed throughout a character, and how this effected the body's pose.






I also started looking at stock photos for different poses, and mostly used SenshiStock[21] from DeviantArt[22], as I have been following her for a while and she always has such varied poses.

I realised I was starting to add way too much detail to such quick sketches, and so I started trying to loosen them up and draw much faster to get more interesting shapes.



The sketches were still a bit too detailed and didn't seem to have the flow I wanted. I then found a series on Youtube[23] that helped me enormously. I really needed some help with getting down to the bare bones of a gesture drawing, and this series really seemed to unlock it in my brain and gave my work so much more life.

The series started with, 'How I Draw ANATOMY #1: Basic Gesture Drawing'[24], which introduced me to a whole new method of drawing gestures. It was quick, simple and completely cleared up all the confusion I had towards anatomy. She explained what gesture drawing was, how to use this technique with stock photos, how to make up your own poses with this technique. She said to use a rectangular flour sack type shape for the body, an oval for the head and triangles for the limbs, to keep it super simple.

She then elaborated in 'How I Draw ANATOMY #2: Line of Action'[25] how to find the line of action, where weight is being distributed and how to create a flow in your characters. This really made it so simple for me, and I couldn't wait to try it out. I used some more films and animations for reference as I tried out these poses.


For this one, I was still finding it quite difficult to stick to basic shapes and find where weight distributed, but I feel I started getting better the further along I got.






These last two pages really show just how practise can help your work come together better. They're worlds away from my original gesture drawings. They have so much more life and flow in them and you can clearly see how weight is distributed onto the floor. I still have a lot to learn and loads more practise to do, but my work seems to be getting much better as a whole.


Doing gesture practise is something that can be quite time consuming and laborious, and it can be quite disheartening to not see any results, but this part of my project just goes to show you can get so much better just by putting in the time and finding something that makes it simpler for you. I'm so happy I feel more confident with gestures, and I feel I can definitely get better work out now I have more of an understanding of gestures.