The 11 Steps to Great Gesture Drawing
Summary
TLDRThis video script delves into the art of gesture drawing, emphasizing the importance of understanding and capturing the essential forms and movements of a figure. It outlines 11 key ingredients for successful gesture drawing, including recognizing anatomical landmarks, simplifying forms, maintaining intuitive proportions, and using specific line types. The script encourages artists to practice with a risk-taking mindset, build confidence, and develop a personal mark-making strategy. It also suggests a challenge for further improvement and community engagement.
Takeaways
- 🎨 **Importance of Fundamentals**: Even if you're missing one of the 11 ingredients for gesture drawing, it can significantly impact the outcome, emphasizing the importance of understanding the basics.
- 👀 **Landmarks and Relationships**: Recognizing key anatomical landmarks and their relationships is crucial for capturing the essence of a figure's gesture.
- 📏 **Understanding Big Forms**: Seeing the overall structure and form of the figure, such as the orientation of the ribcage and pelvis, is vital for dynamic gesture drawing.
- 🧍 **Proportions Matter**: While not needing to be perfectly accurate, maintaining intuitive proportions is essential to avoid distracting from the gesture.
- 🚫 **Limiting Marks**: Using a limited set of C-shaped, S-shaped curves, and straight lines (CSI) can help simplify the drawing process and focus on the essential aspects of gesture.
- ⏱️ **Time Constraints**: Implementing a time limit can encourage decisiveness and prevent getting lost in unnecessary details.
- 🔍 **Finding Asymmetry**: Asymmetry in a figure, like the contrast between squashed and stretched sides, adds visual interest and dynamism to gesture drawings.
- 🌊 **Standard and Pose-Specific Curves**: Utilizing both standard curves that are generally expected and pose-specific curves that capture the unique aspects of a pose.
- 🏞️ **Surface Lines**: Employing surface lines, cross contour lines, or wrapping lines can add gesture and clarify forms, especially in foreshortened views.
- ✏️ **Mark Making Strategy**: Having a personalized mark-making strategy, such as the type of grip or pencil used, can greatly influence the effectiveness of capturing gesture.
- 🧗 **Risk Mindset**: Embracing a risk-taking mindset, similar to Indiana Jones stepping out onto an unseen path, encourages boldness and confidence in each mark made.
- 💪 **Quantity of Practice**: Recognizing that gesture drawing is a skill built through consistent practice and muscle memory, not just theoretical knowledge.
- 🌟 **Confidence**: Allowing oneself to be confident in their abilities, which is built through practice and understanding, is a key ingredient in creating compelling gesture drawings.
Q & A
What is the significance of having 11 ingredients for gesture drawing as mentioned in the script?
-The 11 ingredients represent key elements that contribute to successful gesture drawings. Even missing one can significantly affect the outcome, emphasizing the importance of each aspect in capturing the essence of a figure's movement and form.
Why are important landmarks crucial in gesture drawing according to the script?
-Important landmarks, such as the ASIS points and the sternum, are crucial because they help simplify the complex details of a figure into a few key points, allowing the artist to focus on the major forms and relationships, which is central to capturing the gesture.
How does understanding the big forms aid in gesture drawing?
-Understanding the big forms, such as the orientation of the rib cage and pelvis, helps in gesture drawing by providing a clear sense of the figure's major anatomical structures and their spatial relationships, which is essential for conveying movement and posture.
What is the role of intuitive proportions in creating effective gesture drawings?
-Intuitive proportions play a role in gesture drawing by ensuring that the parts of the figure are relatively accurate to each other, avoiding significant distortions that could distract from the overall gesture. It's about being 'wrong in the right direction' rather than being precisely accurate.
Why is limiting the types of marks to CSI (c-shaped curves, s-shaped curves, and straight lines) beneficial?
-Limiting marks to CSI encourages artists to draw through irrelevant details and focus on the essential forms and movements. This simplification helps in capturing the gesture more effectively by emphasizing the dynamic aspects of the pose.
How does a time limit impact the process of creating gesture drawings?
-A time limit forces artists to be decisive and not get lost in details, which is crucial for gesture drawing. It's not about rushing but about slowing down and making fewer, more purposeful marks that capture the essence of the gesture.
What does the script suggest about finding asymmetry in gesture drawings?
-The script suggests that asymmetry, such as the tension between the squash and stretch sides of the torso or the contrast between straight lines and curves, adds visual interest and dynamism to gesture drawings, making them more gestural and less static.
How do pre-prepared and pose-specific curves contribute to gesture drawing?
-Pre-prepared curves provide a foundation that the artist can rely on, while pose-specific curves add unique details that are created by the particular pose, enhancing the gesture drawing by combining the expected with the unexpected.
What is the importance of surface lines, cross contour lines, or wrapping lines in gesture drawing?
-Surface lines, cross contour lines, or wrapping lines are important as they provide a way to maintain long, gestural curves even in foreshortened forms. They help clarify the form's direction and add to the dynamism of the gesture.
What role does mark making strategy play in gesture drawing?
-A mark making strategy, such as the type of grip or tool used, influences the variety and quality of marks an artist can make, which in turn affects the ability to capture the gesture effectively. It's one of the many tools an artist can use to enhance their gesture drawings.
Why is a risk mindset important when doing gesture drawings?
-A risk mindset is important because it encourages artists to make bold, confident marks without fear of failure. This confidence translates into the drawing, allowing for more dynamic and expressive gesture drawings.
What does the script suggest about the importance of practice in developing gesture drawing skills?
-The script emphasizes that understanding the theory is not enough; a sheer quantity of practice is necessary to build muscle memory and integrate the various ingredients of gesture drawing into one's skillset.
How does confidence play a role in creating effective gesture drawings?
-Confidence is crucial as it allows the artist to make bold, assured marks that convey a sense of certainty and mastery. This confidence in one's abilities enhances the gesture drawing and makes it more engaging for the viewer.
Outlines
🎨 Understanding the Essentials of Gesture Drawing
The paragraph discusses the importance of 11 key ingredients in gesture drawing, emphasizing that even missing one can significantly impact the outcome. It stresses that while one doesn't need to be perfect, having a basic understanding of each is crucial. The first ingredient is recognizing and understanding the figure's important landmarks, which helps in simplifying the complex details into a few key points. The second ingredient involves comprehending the big forms and their orientation, which is facilitated by identifying the landmarks. The paragraph also touches on the idea that clarity in seeing structure and forms can enhance the dynamism of gesture drawings, contrary to the common belief that it makes them stiff.
🧍♂️ Mastering Proportions and Simplicity in Gesture
This section delves into the third ingredient, intuitive proportions, which advises against striving for perfect accuracy but rather maintaining a balance to avoid distracting from the gesture. It warns against common mistakes like elongating the midsection or misjudging the size of the head and legs. The fourth ingredient introduces the concept of using C-shaped curves, S-shaped curves, and straight lines (CSI) to simplify marks and encourage drawing through irrelevant details. The speaker suggests a limit on the number of marks and the use of time limits to enhance decisiveness and avoid detail overload.
🕒 Embracing Asymmetry and Strategic Mark Making
Paragraph 2 continues with the fifth ingredient, finding asymmetry, which is crucial for creating visual interest and gesture in drawings. It contrasts symmetrical forms with more dynamic asymmetrical ones. The sixth ingredient is about using standard pre-prepared curves and pose-specific curves to enhance the gesture. The seventh ingredient discusses the use of surface lines, cross contour lines, or wrapping lines to capture the gesture while clarifying forms. The eighth ingredient focuses on developing a mark-making strategy, such as using an overhand grip and a specific type of pencil, to effectively capture gesture. The paragraph encourages mimicking the strategies of admired artists to find one's own style.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Gesture
💡Landmarks
💡Squash and Stretch
💡Intuitive Proportions
💡CSI Marks
💡Asymmetry
💡Cross Contour Lines
💡Mark Making Strategy
💡Risk Mindset
💡Quantity of Practice
Highlights
Having 10 out of 11 ingredients is considered good, but in figure drawing, missing one can significantly impact the outcome.
You don't need to be perfect in all 11 aspects; having a basic understanding of each is sufficient.
The first ingredient is recognizing the important landmarks of the figure for a clear understanding of the structure.
The second ingredient involves understanding the big forms of the figure, such as the orientation of the rib cage and pelvis.
A clear understanding of structure can lead to more dynamic figure drawings, contrary to the common belief that it makes them stiff.
The third ingredient is intuitive proportions, where accuracy is less critical than maintaining a balance that supports the gesture.
CSI (c-shaped curves, s-shaped curves, and straight lines) is suggested as a guideline for simplifying marks in gesture drawing.
Limiting the number of marks or the types of marks used can encourage focusing on essential details.
A time limit can enforce decisiveness and prevent getting lost in irrelevant details.
Finding asymmetry in the figure, such as squash and stretch, is crucial for capturing the gesture.
Pre-prepared curves and pose-specific curves are important for capturing the gesture of a pose.
Surface lines, cross contour lines, or wrapping lines can provide gesture while clarifying forms.
A mark-making strategy, such as using an overhand grip and a specific type of pencil, can aid in capturing gesture.
A risk mindset, embracing the possibility of failure, is essential for making bold gestural marks.
Quantity of practice is necessary for developing muscle memory and improving gesture drawing skills.
Allowing oneself to be confident in one's abilities is the 11th ingredient, which is built through practice and self-belief.
The Fresh Eyes Challenge is designed to help artists improve their skills in capturing gesture and form.
Transcripts
So today I have 11 ingredients for you for gesture and normally, let's say
you have 10 out of 11. that's pretty good. That's like about 90% or so. Normally
when you're 90% of the way there with something you can really see it, like, you're getting close.
In figure drawing, with these 11 ingredients, if you're missing one, the drawing
still might not look the way you want them to. They might look far from how you want them to look but
the good news is you don't need to be really advanced or perfect on all of these 11 things.
You just need to have something in place for each of them.
The first two ingredients should sound pretty familiar if you saw our last video but it bears going over quickly one more time.
Gesture isn't just in my opinion about big flowing curves that you just feel without
any sense of what's going on in the structure. So the first ingredient is having an idea
of what the important landmarks of the figure are and then being able to see where they are and see
how they relate to each other, because otherwise you're just getting infinite
photons of light coming off this figure into your eyes - so much detail, so much information...
It's so much more straightforward and simple when you can boil it down to a few important points and
one characteristic of gesture is that simplicity and clarity. So important landmarks like the ASUS points,
the bony points on the front of the pelvis, the sternum - how far down is that ribcage coming
like in the last video we talked about, those collar bones, for the head you can look at the
brow line, how it relates to the top of the ear and get a sense of that cranium and whether it's
tilted back or tilted forward and stuff like that. Once you notice these fundamental ideas
you can start to get a sense of the major forms in the figure. How is the rib cage oriented?
So this is the second ingredient, is understanding the big forms and that is helped when you can see
the landmarks, which is that first ingredient, so then when you can see that rib cage and pelvis
you can see, oh this side's all squashed up, there's a fold here, this side is all stretched out,
the head is on this angle, and so I'm going to draw the head off on that angle. And when you don't
get these ideas, when you don't see the squash and stretch clearly, when you don't get the head on its
angle correctly, things easily get straightened out and so actually I think when you have this
kind of clarity, when you see the structure and the forms, you can make your figures more dynamic.
Often you think it makes things stiff. I think if you see with that clarity, you can get those angles
and that tension between the squashing side and the stretching side and you can add more dynamism.
Now I'm not saying that a gesture drawing should be like an anatomy study where you're
really painstakingly mapping out all the little anatomical things that's happening but an
intuitive sense of the major anatomical forms and how they relate is central to the gesture drawing.
Now the third ingredient is about intuitive proportions. So you don't need to
map things out painstakingly and get things super accurate. But the thing is, if things are really
way off, if they're way out of proportion, it's going to distract from the gesture or dilute the
gesture. So for example, often people make that midsection between the rib cage and pelvis
too long and I talked about the importance of the squash and stretch. If you make that too long, the
squash side is less squashed because it's just been stretched out on the squash side and
that dilutes that tension between the squash side and the stretch side of the torso. Another thing
is, very often people will make their head a bit big, make their hips and legs too small, and that
seems to undermine the gesture. You don't need to be accurate, you just need to be
wrong in the right direction. So what you can do is go for a head that's roughly about the right size
or a bit small but not too big. For legs that are roughly the right length or a bit long but not too
short, and even though you can go a little bit long don't go super long because then it's just going
to be distracting. So there's definitely a range of error you can be in there but you don't want to be
getting things too short in the legs or too big in the head and you don't want to go way outside of that range.
So the next thing is CSI. Not that one. This one. Just c-shaped curves, s-shaped curves
and straight lines. Now, this isn't a rule. None of these are rules. I'm making this sound
like a bunch of rules but it's not about rules, it's about guidelines, because gesture is hard
to get to and so it's nice to have some specific steps to get there. And so one really nice idea
is this limiting your marks to c-shaped curves, s-shaped curves and straight lines. It means the
most complex mark you're ever going to put down is an s-shaped curve. It will encourage you to
draw straight through irrelevant details and it's really hard to let go of those details but when
you can only use CSI marks, that helps. Now, what you don't want to do is use a million CSI marks,
you want to use maybe, I don't know, 15 up to 30 CSI marks. These are numbers that you don't need
to kind of really restrict yourself to but I feel like that is a really nice exercise actually, when
you say, I'm going to use max 12 lines, for example. That is really going to push you to draw through
irrelevant information and find the things that really matter. I tend to find that for a lot of
the gesture drawings I do, there might be like 30 marks on them. One other tool aside from limiting
how many marks or the types of marks you use is a time limit. So that is going to make sure
that you're decisive and that you're not getting lost in detail as you're doing these drawings.
Now I think often people misuse these by putting a time limit on and then panicking and just trying
to rush through it and put as many marks down as possible, ttrying to basically draw in their normal
way but quicker. When you have a time limit, you need to slow down and draw less. That's
your only hope. So, if you have two minutes, say, but you're only going to make 30 marks, that's
four seconds (the maths is still there) per mark so that's plenty of time to make all the marks
you need for your drawing. Even if you have one minute, you've got two seconds per mark. That's a leisurely pace.
The fifth ingredient is finding asymmetry. So a lot of what makes gesture is the
relationship between the two sides of the forms so, like the squash and stretch in the torso, it's
that tension between the nice stretched out smoother side and then the sharp angle change
on the squash side. And those two sides play off against each other and it creates a lot of visual
interest. If they were symmetrical it would be way less gestural. Another nice relationship
between the two sides is a straight line against the curve. There's this real simplicity and
kind of clarity of the straight line and then more fluidity on the curved side. Another really nice
form of asymmetry is offset curves. So symmetrical curves are not good, but when you have those curves
offset against each other, they create a really nice asymmetrical dynamic.
So the sixth ingredient is to have some standard pre-prepared curves and then some post-specific curves. So the standard
pre-prepared ones are like, you know they're going to be there, so they give you a head start. You see
a straight leg from the side, you're naturally going to find that s-shaped curve down the front
of it. If you see a straight leg from the front you're going to find offset curves going down
the sides of it. And then you can add pose-specific curves, like big flowing curves that happen to be created by that pose
So the seventh ingredient is surface lines, cross contour lines or wrapping lines.
Often a gestural curve is a big long curve, so when you have an arm, you might
have a big long curve to capture the gesture of that arm, when something is really foreshortened,
the edges on the outline of it become short - it's all foreshortened - and so it's not a nice big
long line anymore, but we can find a big long curve now wrapping around the form. That becomes the long
curve. So you can still put those lines down around the outline of the form but now you can add those
big surface lines, those cross contour lines, and they're going to provide a lot of gesture
while also clarifying the forms. Another really nice thing is they tell us the direction,
they tell us how that form is coming towards us, and changing directions is part of the dynamism of the pose and therefore of the gesture.
So the eighth ingredient is a mark making strategy
I think that a lot of people think that this is all they need when they see someone doing
the gestural drawings, it must just be all about this, but this is just one out of the 11.
But it is important. So for me, my mark making strategy for most of my gestural drawings is
to use an over hand grip, use a pencil that is sharpened to have quite a long bit of the lead
exposed with a little bit of a tapering to it and then use smooth newsprint and then I can put down
all kinds of different marks that way and that helps me to capture the gesture the way I want to.
That is one of many mark making strategies. You can use a brush pen, you can use all kinds
of different materials and stuff like that, but it's good to basically find the gesture drawings
that you love the most, they could be digital, they could be with brush, they could be with whatever.
Find the artist whose gesture drawings you really love and just start off by matching their strategy.
What kind of grip do they use? How do they get the pencil ready? What kind of brush pen or whatever they're using? And mimic that.
So the ninth ingredient is the risk mindset. Now, my head always
goes to this scene from Indiana Jones. He can't see where the line is, can't see where the path is.
He's got to just step out onto it and hope that it's there. Now, Indiana Jones could have
fallen down there. There might not have been a path there, and that's going to happen when you're
doing your gesture drawings. Fortunately you're not going to die, so it's okay! Just keep taking
that step that Indiana Jones takes with every mark. Don't be like, oh my god, this has to be safe,
this has to be okay, the drawing has to not fail here. You're not gonna fall down into an endless
pit. It's just going to be, oh I just do another drawing, it's okay. So take that risk with every mark.
Do it like you're confident about it. Do it like you mean it even though you're not actually sure it's going to work.
Now the 10th ingredient is a sheer quantity of practice.
You can understand all of these ideas but don't expect yourself to sit down on day one or day two or day three and
just be able to push out a bunch of fantastic gesture drawings. It is a muscle memory thing.
So you can understand the theory at the end of this video, but it's going to take a long time
to get to those gestural drawings and hopefully with this video you've understood that actually
it's built on some anatomical know-how, it's built on some ability with simple forms, there's a lot
to it, you need to have a good intuitive sense of proportions. And all of these things take time
to build. You're putting these bricks in place, brick by brick, and you need to
build that wall quite a bit before it's going to really translate into fantastic gesture drawings.
So you've got to give yourself that time, give yourself time to make lots of failed drawings
as long as you're working on these ideas and on these skills and not just mindlessly
drawing inside your comfort zone, but really trying to push towards building these 11 ingredients,
building ingredients? The analogy has completely fallen apart! But you know what I mean. This takes time, so give yourself that quantity of practice
So the 11th secret ingredient is a bit vague but
I think it's really important. It's to allow yourself to be confident. If you've done that quantity of
practice, if you've worked on all of these skills, at some point you're going to have to think to
yourself, you know what? I am good at this, I can do this, I'm confident about what I'm doing. That
confidence is really useful when you're putting down these gestural marks but you have to allow
yourself to believe that. If you've done all these other bits of work that I've described, you
then have to allow yourself to be confident. Now, we as artists are often so self-critical and we
don't want to be arrogant or whatever. We don't want to seem delusional, we don't want to appear
like we think we're good at stuff, so we'll be really self-critical and self-deprecating.
But to get those beautiful gestural curves requires you to think, you know what?
I know what I'm doing here and I'm awesome at this and I can do this. It makes a huge difference and
when you have that confidence, the marks have that confidence and then the viewer's eyes are going to
enjoy that confidence. It's strange but it is an ingredient all by itself and it is
built by doing the work and doing the practice. It's not just based on nothing, but you also have
to take that step of actually giving yourself that confidence. So if you really want to work
on your skills of bringing things down to their fundamental forms, seeing that squash and stretch
intuitively, simplifying while still recognizing that structure, bringing out those surface lines
we designed the fresh eyes challenge specifically for that. So it's 10 days and it is transformative
for your drawings if you work through it. Now I'm going to run that challenge in January live
so we can do it together. We'll do new live streams for it, got some new poses to do it
so even if you've already done it, it's worth revisiting and we're going to go through it
all together in January. So if you want to join in with that, make sure you're signed up to our
community. It's free to join. The fresh eyes challenge is in there. And make sure you're
on our newsletter and that way I'll give you all the links and the information
and stuff and we can go through this challenge together. It's going to be really really great
way to start off the new year. If you want to learn more about gesture drawing, check out
the video on the screen. It'll give you all the things you need to look for in any pose
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