Scroll down for the accompanying text.
I touched on the importance of gesture drawing in the Sketching
Tutorial: Breaking Out of the Box.
A quick recap:
The most important thing to making art is the realization
that a finished piece is the product of hundreds of studies, practices,
or no-so-finished pieces. A major part of "learning to draw"
is learning to sketch. If you go to a fine art school, you'll spend your
first year "life drawing" (drawing from a model) or "still
life" (drawing from a set up scene, like a fruit bowl. How droll.)
It's boring and it's tedious, but it has to be done. You can't do calculus
without knowing algebra!
Anyone can tell you "build the figure using cubes, spheres, and cylinders," but building robots like that completely loose the feel of the "organic" creature--something made of fluid lines, curves, thicks and thins, and most important: movement. Movement becomes Story, and Story becomes a great work of art.
Gesture sketches are what art students learn to do to learn to create fluid characters. Its a sketch of a complicated pose done by a model, and the student has 10-25 seconds to capture that pose on paper. What you get when you start out is scribbles and the art equivalent of gibberish. After time, you develop an "economy of lines," the ability to capture movement, weight and physical feel in a few strokes. It takes time, but so does everything worth having.
It builds a foundation and natural understanding for form, substance and weight your subconscious remembers.
The next time you go to draw, your body will react with natural ease.
Driving a car becomes second nature, and so will the human (or animal) form if you practice enough.
HOW TO DO IT:
You don't need a professional model. All you need is a window. Sketch
people walking by, or go to the zoo and sketch animals. The attached sheet
of dog gesture drawings was done at a dog park in town. Really, there
is no limit to where you can find people or animals to put to paper.
Photos are an alright alternative if you simply cannot make it outside,
or the weather does not permit, or you know no one who is willing to let
you sketch them, or every pub, library, street, coffee shop and restaurant
has had every living creature but you killed off by some alien virus.
The problem with photos: it is a static image, harder to see and feel
the movement of the subject, your eye perceives it differently than real
life (specially on a monitor screen) AND lastly, you have to rely on yourself
to say "time is up," because your subject will sit there obligingly
for an eternity.
Time yourself with a clock with a second hand, or ask a friend to sit in with you and take turns sketching and timing. If you can work well with outside influences going on, commercials are usually 30 seconds. Why not spend the time between shows doing a set of gesture drawings of people outside, or your cat sleeping, or your friend posing?
Work Evenly, Quickly, And Fluidly.
Working quickly does not imply frantically or with stress. In the beginning, you have to let yourself be willing to just scribble on paper. Tell yourself it's not going to be a work of art for a gallery--its practice, no one but you is going to see it! Eventually, you'll have yourself trained that you can just focus on the pose and get what you can on paper in the 15-45 seconds you've given yourself.
WHY SO SHORT OF TIME?
"My drawing is looking great, but then I run out of time! I'll
just give myself an extra minuet..." The reason for gesture drawings
is not to make a great picture. It's to exercise your brain and hand
together to get the right lines on paper. You didn't get the whole form
in 20 seconds? Oh well, time to try again.
Work Fluidly: This comes down to materials. You want
to use something that is easy to move quickly around the paper, and
doesn't smudge too easily. Most paint is hard to gesture sketch with
because it takes time to dry and re wet the brush--stay away from paint
for this.
I recommend an ink pen that flows easily, a Sharpie, or charcoal if
you are using large paper. Experiment until you find something that
works well for you!
The art of gesture drawing is something that does not come easily. It does take time, and practice, but it is something you can improve upon quickly and the results will show it if you apply the little bit of effort. Try to gesture sketch 3-4 times a week for 15 minuets, at least, or at most, 5 days a week. Like most things, your brains needs breaks in between sessions to absorb the concepts and incorporate them.
VERY IMPORTANT: Let yourself go from the mindset that every time your pencil touches paper it must be better than the last time! It will only make you tense. Progress comes in small steps--it's not a smooth slope.
Gesture drawing is also fun. It's a little personal challenge to create
a finished sketch in a short period of time.
This is a sheet of gesture drawings of dogs done while sitting at a
local dog park ( a fenced in area where dogs can run off leash.)
Each sketch took about 20-40 seconds, and is in either Sharpie or Mircon
pens.
It is good to sketch a lot of kinds of people and animals. You can take what you learn and apply it other places. A broad base of knowledge will win over specialization anyday!
Cheers,
-Blotch