Complete Gesture Drawing Course: Create Dynamic Gestures!

1. Intro: Are you ready to give an extra dynamic touch to your poses? Do you want to create characters and art that stand out from the crowd? That this is the course for you. In this course, you learn everything there is to know about ester drawing from how to draw dynamic gestures to the secrets of gesture drawing? That will take you a step above other artists. Hi. I'm Patricia from Don Corgi, a professional art teacher who has taught thousands of students over the last decade? I'm here to help you become a better artist and very easy to follow steps? Not only that, but you'll get real time demonstrations of me creating dynamic gesture drawings in several videos. This way, you can follow along and learn using actual examples. You'll also get downloadable templates and helpful assignments to get feedback on your art. So are you ready to give an extra life to your drawings? Join now, and I'll see you in the next video. 2. What Is Gesture Drawing?: Hello and welcome. Before we start learning and drawing, let's first talk a bit about gesture drawing. Gesture drawing is a very helpful exercise where you focus on capturing the form, movement, pose, and even move of a subject with as few strokes as possible. Here, instead of focusing on anatomy, you'll focus on the expression of your drawing. Although you're not drawing anatomy perfectly, gesture drawing can help you be more confident when drawing the human figure. These drawings are usually quite quick and simple. The idea is for you to be able to capture the whole pose and action as quickly as possible without focusing on details. When you're done, it should be clear what you drew while keeping simplicity to it. Of course, this might feel quite difficult and even impossible at first. But with a few good exercises that we'll be practicing throughout this class, time, you'll get more confident in your own gestures. With practice, you'll start understanding what's important in a pose and what are the right lines to reproduce the movement and its mood. Usually, gesture drawing is a time exercise. Between each pose, it's good to set up a timer, so you're sure you won't fall into the temptation of drawing unnecessary details. For beginners, I tend to recommend something between 1 minute and a half and 2 minutes. As you get used to gesture drawing, you can challenge yourself and go for drawings that won't go over 30 seconds. There are also different ways for you to practice gesture drawing. And the process you choose is totally up to you. In short, there are no wrong answers here and the way you draw a pose can be different from any other artists. As long as the pose is there, you've done it right. But more specifically, you can draw gestures by only using lines and contours. Another option is to use a few lines and big shaded areas that represent the body and its form. You can also just focus on very simple shapes. Drawing something close to stick figures is also perfectly valid, as long as it works for you. A few sticks in circles can easily translate the poles into paper, and later you can refine your drawing. With a few examples, you can already have a vague idea of what esto drawing is. Quick, simple drawings of the human body that focus on capturing poles and movement. Now follow me to the next video, so we can dive into it a bit more. 3. Test Your Gesture (Mini-Assignment): Hello, and welcome back. Now, before we talk more about ester drawing and how to do it, I have a mini assignment for you. Download this photo and then make a quick gesture of it. It doesn't need to be perfect nor detailed. Just a quick drawing that captures the post in the photo. You can post and share the results of your assignment if you want, but the goal of this exercise is for you to have a point of reference of your ability and improvement. At the end of the class, you can compare this first drawing with the ones you'll do afterwards. And this way, you can see your progress and how much you learned. I'm also going to do the same without warming up just a quick gesture drawing. This is my gesture for this exercise, and now it's your turn. Download the photo, draw a quick gesture of it, and then follow me to the next video. 4. Secrets Of Gesture Drawing: Low again and welcome back. When starting to learn something new, it's good to divide it into smaller and simple steps along with easy strategies to follow. This way, it's less overwhelming and learning becomes much more enjoyable. This video focus on a few tips to help you start drawing gestures, the easiest way with as few as possible bumps in the way. As mentioned in the previous video, ignore most details in the post you're drawing. It's really easy to get lost in those and waste time trying to fix small little details. That does make sense when you're working on a full handled illustration. However, your goal with gesture drawing isn't to have a perfect detailed drawing. I'm going to tell you a secret. You don't even have to draw the face. Most of the times when drawing gesture, I'll just draw a round shape and a few guidelines for the head. Unless it's something I want to translate on paper due to the mood of the pose, I'll just ignore it. In truth, being able to show emotion through your lines and pose without drawing the face is quite challenging and interesting to tackle. So whenever you feel drawn to focus on a particular detail of the pose your drawing, stop and move on. This is why having a timer is so helpful. It will drive you to focus on what's important. Another important aspect of creating a good and expressive gesture is to be quick about it. I'm not trying to rush you here, but it's something that's really good to practice. Most of the times, we feel that if we do something slowly, it will result in something better, which a lot of the time is true. However, with gesture, you'll be able to draw more expressive and fluid lines by drawing quick long strokes instead of drawing each line slowly. I know it sounds overwhelming at first. When starting to learn how to draw, we don't have control over our lines. But one way to learn to have that control and gain confidence in your drawings is by drawing quick lines. In the long run, this will also be healthier for you. Since most of the times, you'll apply too much force on your wrists and hands when trying to slowly draw your lines. It is true that your first tries at being quick with your gestures might not be too good. But that's okay. Just keep going and you'll get better at it. To gain some confidence, you can just practice by filling a few sketchbook pages with quick lines in any direction and size. Then you can apply that to gesture drawing. Something else you can do to make gesture drawing more fun, but also to explore different techniques and materials is to try different mediums. Different tools create different results. If this is something that's interesting for you, be sure to try and experiment as much as you can. Graphite pencils or charcoal, even inside both these mediums, there are different levels of hardness that allow you for different styles of gesture drawings. The same goes for markers and pens. There are many different colors and tips you can dry. You can even mix different tools, for example, pencils and water colors. There is no right way to practice gesture drawing and you can even develop a style out of it. Even if you prefer to draw digitally, nowadays, there are so many different brushes that allow you to do many different styles and textures while drawing. This not only brings a new perspective to gesture drawing, but it might also help you find your art and work style. Now when practicing gesture drawing, you'll need poses. For those, you'll need references. But one of the most important things in gesture drawing is being able to find good references. This is especially important if you're just starting. The poses you're drawing should be as clear as possible. It's good to start with simple poses and grow from there. But be sure the photos have good enough lightning and perspective. One thing to pay attention is how well you can see the body of the model. Ideally, you'll want to find nude models, but if that's something you don't like, then find pictures of people wearing tight clothes or even underwear. Drawing a pose of someone wearing everyday outfits can be quite tricky since most of the times, the fabric will hide certain areas of the body and it's hard to understand how to draw it. If you want to practice drawing the gesture of fabric, different clothes, and outfits, it's possible as well and a good exercise. However, if you want to focus on drawing the human body, then be sure it's probably visible. We'll talk about a few places you can find the perfect pose references in the following video. But one thing you can do if that's something you'd enjoy is take your own reference photos. Me of the poses you want to draw, take pictures of yourself and then draw them. A good thing about taking your own photos is that you'll always have the exact poses you're looking for. Finally, before moving on to the next video, don't waste time trying to fix your drawings. Don't even bring an eraser with you. If there's any mistake, leave it. You can instead repeat the drawing several times and compare each version and see your progress. Or if you're just not working at the moment, move on to the next pose. Just a drawing is something you evolve by repeating and learning with your mistakes. With each pose, you learn something new. Leaving your mistakes means you can come back to it, analyze it, and figure out how to fix them in the next drawing. You'll make a lot of bad drawings, and that's okay. Get all those drawings out of the way one by one and watch your evolution with each stroke. This is it for this video. Follow me to the next video, where we'll talk about the lines in gesture drawing. 5. The Lines Of Gesture Drawing: Hi, and welcome back. Let's talk about the lines of gesture drawing. As mentioned, there are many ways for you to practice gesture drawing, but there are a few concepts that will help you out while practicing. The first and most important is the line of action. You might already heard about it before, but basically the line of action is a line that evokes the whole pose of the body. Usually, this line follows the spine of the human body, but it can diverge from that. You can practice finding the line of action by gathering a few photos and drawing a line on top of it. Just lower the opacity of the photo and then draw a line that represents the movement of the pose. One thing to remember is that there is no one true line of action. One pose can have more than one line of action, and you can draw the one that makes the most sense to you. As with most things when it comes to drawing is that there is no wrong way to go about it. If it makes sense and works, then it's the right way for you. Next, when it comes to lines and just to drawing, quick long strokes are generally better than short ones. This, of course, might depend on the pose and specific areas you're drawing. But generally speaking, drawing long confident lines will show more fluidity and expression in your poses. Once again, a good way to practice this is by drawing several lines on a sketchbook in several directions to become more confident in your lines before going for pose drawings. Your lines don't need to be perfect, but chances are they look much better when you're less afraid of drawing a long line quickly instead of trying to slowly draw it. It's also good to find a good balance between curved and straight lines. The body is made out of different shapes and curves, and it can be fun and interesting to play with that. For example, a lot of the times, while one side is curved, the other is straighter. Take advantage of that with your gestures. It can annual makeup for very interesting drawings and pauses. Finally, shapes. The body is made out of lines, but also made out of shapes. Each part of the body can be made out of a random and simple shape. Imagine no bodies as if it were a legal construction. Instead of trying to outline the whole thing, divide it into individual blocks of legal connected to each other. By breaking things into smaller shapes, it gets easier to understand the pose and the body. It would also make it easier to draw them. For me, these four concepts of lines for gesture drawing help draw better poses and also develop my style. Hopefully, this will be helpful for you too. We'll apply all of this when practicing gesture drawing. But for now, follow me to the next video, where we'll talk about resources and where you can find reference images to help you practice. 6. Best Websites For Gesture Drawing References: Hello, and welcome back. All right, we went through a lot of theory here, and we did talk a bit about references and how important it is to find good reference photos. In this video, we'll talk about places to find those references, as well as websites where you can practice ester drawing. One of those websites and the favorite is line of action.com. Here you can choose from different categories depending on what you want to practice, full body, hands, faces, and expressions, animals, basic shapes, and even scenes and environments. When you choose a category, for example, figure drawing, you can then customize your session, the kind of models you want and how long do you want each image to show for? Then just start your session and start drawing. You can pose a session at any point if you need more time or take a break. You can also move on to the next image if you're done with the one shown. Overall, this is a great place to practice gesture drawing, filled with many different images, and it's interesting that you can choose different categories, so you can practice different areas and themes. Another similar website you can use is catchaily.net. This is a more straightforward website, but still allows you for some customization, such as the type of model, node or clothed, the kind of poses you want to see and different views. If you want to focus on a particular view of the body, you can narrow down your options. Like before, you can also choose the timer for each picture. Here there are also different categories to choose from. If you want to practice the gesture of particular areas of the body or even animals, you can do so as well. Once again, once the session starts, you can pose at any time and the session or skip images. They are very similar websites and I enjoy both very much. Feel free to take a look and see how you feel about them. I'm sure you'll have fun practicing figure and gesture drawing with them. Finally, one last website you can use to practice is at dork atok.com. On this models website, you can find a sketch tool that will work similarly to the previous ones. Although less customization, you can still choose how long will the session be and a timer for each image. Then you'll go through a big collection of reference photos taken by the creator of this website. As for reference images as mentioned, it's important to find good photos where you can clearly see the body. Even if you don't want to draw noude bodies, there are many options around such as a Darker stock mentioned previously. This is a famous creator among artists with many reference photos, with several themes, and even collaborations. Each photo is very clear and the outfits allow you to properly see the body, so you can draw it without any doubt. There are other similar creators such as the pose archives. This pair focus a lot on couple reference photos, but also single references with different themes, always with a female and male version. This way, if you're looking for a specific pose for your characters and drawings, you'll definitely find what you're looking for in any gender. Another pose reference model I always look for is Joke Bob stock. Zu pop has many different reference poses, all quite interesting and sometimes even with different lighting effects. If it's something you want to practice in your gesture and figure drawing. All of these offer many free options on their platforms or social media. You'll always be able to easily find reference material to use. This is it for now. Take some time to search for some reference photos and choose a few if you want, and then follow me to the next video where we'll be trying a few simple gesture drawing exercises to warm up. 7. 60 Seconds Gesture Drawing Warmups: Hello, and welcome back. It's time to warm up with a few simple gesture drawing exercises. Before we start drawing, let's quickly talk about each of them. Each of these exercises is quite short and will only take 1 minute each. I'll be using a few reference photos that you can download to practice with them as well. If you prefer, you can just find your own images by looking them up online, taking your own photos or using the websites we talked about in the previous video. The first exercise will focus only on line of action. All you have to do is look at the image and find the line of action that capture the movement of the pose. Remember that there's no wrong answer here. What I draw can be different from what you draw. This is very simple and perfect if you feel a bit overwhelmed about drawing the whole body and pose. The next exercise is all about shapes. Here we'll draw the pose by using only basic and simple shapes, circles, squares, triangles, or any other irregular shape. For this one, you can even draw on top of your images. In fact, I do recommend you do that since it can help you understand the pose better. Then repeat the shapes to the side so you can memorize the pose and its movement. The third exercise requires some strategy. Draw a pose in one continuous line. Here we're not allowed to pick up our pencil. We'll have to try to draw the whole pulse using only one line. Again, you can practice first on top of the image and then repeat the process to the sit. This develops muscle memory, but also helps you slowly understand how the body moves and how to draw it, keeping the fluidity of the pulse. Finally, let's draw one or more of the poses we drew so far, but this time, draw it for memory. Choose one of the poses you drew through these exercises, take a good look at it and then move it away from view. Start your timer and draw that pose for memory. It might be a bit hard at first, but with practice, you'll be able to more easily draw the human body without relying so heavily on references. References will always be a major resource and you should always use them while drawing. However, practicing your memory is also good. We will set up a 60 seconds timer for each exercise. It might feel like it's too quick, but you got this. It doesn't matter how many drawings you managed to finish within this time. Just have fun with the exercises and repeat them as many times as you wish. Without further ado, let's start. 8. DEMO: 60s Gesture Drawings: Okay. Here we are. It's time to do our exercises that I just described it previously. We'll start with the simplest one, which is the line of action. I'm going to put up a time, a 1 minute timer, and we'll try to draw as many line of actions as we can. Three, two, one, start. I'm going to to what I talked before, which is first, I'm going to draw the line of action on top of our images. For example, I would say something like this. Now I'm going to go here to the side and I'm going to draw the line of action. I can even draw the head just so I know what it is. Now for the second one, there it goes. Very simple as well. And the hell about here. T done. Let's go for the next two. So let's see this one. I'm going to say this and this. And we are out of time. 1 minute, T line of actions, as you can see. It's all very smooth, very simple, even messy, but you see I first went to look for the line of action in the picture, drawing on top of the picture as you saw, and then practice the line of action to the side. This is something you can do. If it feels like it's too overwhelming to just go on the blank paper and draw the line of action or even the whole pose, you can try and draw on top of the picture first. This is an idea. Our second exercise is shapes. Again, I'm going to start with the first images, focus on shapes. Again, I'm going to draw first on top of the image and then to the side, the shapes that I just used. Three, two, one, start. He is a circle. Then I'm going to use a trapezium shape here. Don't forget the line of action. A circle, triangular shape, rectangles for the legs, and a mixed shape for the rest of the legs and a triangle for the feet. Now, rectangles and circles for the arms. There we go. See triangle for the feet. Another arm right here. And we are out of time. You see, the more complex the exercise is, the harder it is to make more positions. Drying the shapes takes some time. Of course, it isn't exactly what we saw. I'm doing this very quickly, but that's the idea for you to be quick. Don't think about being perfect, the pose being perfect. We just want to warm up a bit and do this very quickly. I'm going to do it again for this one. For example, head, we talked about the line of action. This one has very interesting shapes. For example, I can use a lemon wedge here. And then do the same thing on the other side. We got the knee, another lemon wedge and a triangle for the foot. Rectangle, rectangle, and hands. Line of action head, mon white shape, lemon white shape again in another position, leg, the knee, and triangle for the foot. Then we have our arm. And the hands. There we go. Very simple, very messy, but that's fine. Now, next we had the continuous line, which is quite hard to do because this one requires a bit more planning, but we can do this. Put a time, 1 minute counting now. I'm going to start with ahead going down like we did with the With a line of action, and arm, hands, leg again and feet. We've got here and arm again, shoulder, and there we go. Now I'm trying to remember what we did. Going down again. Feet leg, going the other side, hand here, arm, another shoulder and connect everything. Very weird right, but it's here. Now for the next one head, we go circle here, one leg, foot, and we're out of time, but I'm going to very quickly finish this p and there we go. Now we can repeat it. Circle going down and there we go. As you can see, I'm making very weird shapes, but I'm getting warmed up and I'm getting more confident in my lines and letting myself go with it. That's good. That's what we want. There's only one exercise left, which is drawing our poses from memories. Which one should I do? Maybe I'm going to do this one since I think it's the one I drew the most, although I like this one more, but I'm going to go for the first one. You can choose whichever pose you prefer. As I said, you can use anything that you found online, that's also possible. Now we're going to draw from memory. Let's see if I don't forget her pose. So hiding the image and the time started, let's do this. We have the head. We had something like this. Then circle right triangle here. Now once again, this might not be too good, which is fine because I just want to warm up and get comfortable with my poses. There we go. I finished the first one very messy. That's fine. Let's try the second one. No on wedge, the leg triangle. I made it too close to the ground. And there we go. Our time is done. As you can see, these are very, very quick and weird doodles. That's fine. You can do these exercises more often. You can also set up a larger time or so a bit more time if that's what you need. But as you can see, my drawings aren't pretty right now. Let's just take a look at our images by the way. For example, you see, I drew this arm here way too far from the body. Or arm is a bit closer to the body and I pointed pointed it all the way down. Same thing with this one is too high up. There are a lot of mistakes. It's fine. I'm just trying to figure out poses. I'm just trying to get the movement in here. It's messy. It's not a good drawing. It's not a drawing. I'm going to share online or or view it as a very important art piece. It's not, but we are getting a bit more comfortable with our lines and our poses, right. This is it for now, and I will see you in the next video. 9. Practice Time! Assignment: Hi, and welcome back. It's time for your first assignment. Simply pick one or several of the exercises from a previous video. It doesn't matter which one or how many, just have fun with practice. If drawing a post from memory feels too overwhelming for you right now, then go for a simple exercise such as the line of action one or drawing the shapes. It's all up to you how many exercises you do. Don't forget to use a Tier as well, so you don't get distracted with small details. Once you're done, post your drawings. I always love to see what you come up with and we'll give you some feedback if you want. This is it for now, have fun and I'll see you in the next video. 10. DEMO: Dynamic Gesture Drawing With References: All right. Hello, and welcome back. Now it's time. We looked at a bunch of references, we learned what gesture drawing is. We made a few very quick exercises and we learned that we don't need to make beautiful drawings, especially when we're doing it very quickly. Now we're going to take things slowly. We're going to make some gesture drawing. I have here a bunch of references. And we're going to draw this pose, draw each of this pose. I don't know how long we'll take, but we will take our time this time and have some fun. First, I'm going to find my shapes in the picture, and then I'll repeat those shapes to the side. Line of action going to use this one, the head. Let's see the shape for our torso, something like this, circle. And now a triangular shape here for the waist area. Now we're going down and the triangle for the feet. Same thing, legs, triangle for the foot. Arms, circle for the shoulders, rectangle for the arms, another circle for the elbow, and then arm arm here and heads. Let's to the side right head. Torso with a circle and with shape triangular shape for the waist. Now leg going down, circle trig for the foot of the leg triangle for the foot. Now shoulders. Rectangle for the arm, circle for the elbow and another rectangle for the arm. Now our hand, another arm, and there we go. One pose the next one. Let's practice, find the shapes. Before this, we want the line of action. Head lemon weight shape. Another lemon weight shape. Rectangle for the leg, circle for the knee, the other leg, and triangle for the feet. Circle for the shoulder, rectangle, another circle for the elbow, and rest of the arm, and our hand. Don't forget the other arm, and that's it. Let's try it out. Heads lemon for the torso, another lemon wedge for the lower area of the body, rectangle, circle rest of the leg, triangle for the foot. Circle for the shoulder, rectangle, circle for the elbow, the other arm and now our hands. There we go. I really like this pose. This pose makes very beautiful shapes here. One more time. Let's go for the next line of action or my line of action is very simple here. We got here circle, torso. Shoulder, circle waist area, one leg, circle, the other leg, and a triangle the foot. Another rectangle and circle rest of the leg, triangle. Arms rectangles and circles, rectangles and circles. Something else you can do is add some guidelines so you know where everything goes and the dro it. It can also be very helpful. Had our torso here. Circle and then waist area. Rectangle for the leg, circle, rest of the leg, and then we have our foot. Is it turned right. As you can see I'm being very messy here. I like to be very messy with this. When doing some get a drawing, it really depends on the kind of drawing I'm going for. But when I'm just practicing, I like to be quick. This time, let's try drawing without drawing on top. We have something like this, and then one line going up. Okay. You got the head, white shape, the lemon white shape. Another lemon white shape. One leg, knee. Angle for the foot. Other legs here the size a bit and another foot and now shoulder elbow hand. T. And there we go. As you get more used and more confident, you can stop drawing on top of our images and then start looking at the image and draw to the side of it. But again, it's all about confidence. If you don't feel confident yet in that, then continue to find the shapes first on the image and then repeat it to the side. If you're feeling confident and with a lot of courage there, then you can start doing as I'm doing here. Let's see the next one. This is a very tricky one. First the line of action, which for me is something like this. Almost like a D. The letter D, there we go. Here, we have our head, lemon white shape. Now Another lemon wet shape going here. Well, this is a bit more of a circle. Bit of an shape. This big is a bit too big. This shape here is a bit too big. There we go maybe something more like this. I can divide this even something like this, maybe. Now we have our leg circle and the rest of the leg. And triangle for the foot. Now here we have the head is here and we see the arm is in front, so something more like this, elbow, rest of the arm and hand. There we go and I'm missing one leg. I almost forgot that leg over there. Triangle for the foot. There we go. We have here our pose. If I want to refine it, I'll be able to add more details and make the pose look a bit cleaner. But we're not interested in that right now. Next one, go and search for our shapes first. Line of action, where is it? Let this one. Head. Torso. One leg, triangle foot, O leg, arms. Shoulder, the other arm and had. There we go. Had torso. Look at the shapes you draw them again. He goes a bit to the side and s. O the leg. Now the other arm. And there we go. Let's see our next. I'm going to do something like this for line of action. The head goes here. Something like this, shoulders, and the arms appear here and here. Now, one leg, and the other going the other side. There we go. Now, the last image this for the line of action. One leg. Now, the other one shows up here, right? One arm here, and the other arm going this way, and there we go. There's a lot of things happening here in the front of the pose. But this is it, a drawing. You don't need to worry about the, but if you want, you can do that as well. Go over your drawing and draw the clothes. Instead of drawing the legs here, I can just go. And draw the pants. Same thing here. Instead of drawing the legs, I'm going to go and draw the pants. There we go. There we go. This is what you can do after finishing your drawings. You gesture drawings is going over them and that some details. This looks immediately much better than before right. Looks much more interesting. There are some clothes here. But as you can see, I started with a very, very massive drawing and now we add a few more details. It looks a bit prettier right. This is what you can do afterwards, doing your gesture drawings is to go over the poses again and refine them a little bit. But for the first part, I don't want you to worry about that. I want you to worry first on this part here. Seeing the pose, seeing the movement of the pose and drawing it. Then it doesn't matter if it's ugly, if it's messy, that's fine. Just do those gestures, and then you can go in and refine everything just like I did here. This is it for now. Follow me to the next video, where we're going to talk about your assignment. 11. Assignment 2: Let's Practice!: Hello, and welcome back. It's time for your second assignment, which is very simple. Using all the information you learned to the class, go through a small session of gesture drawing as we did in the previous video. You can use one of the websites mentioned previously, gather some reference photos or download the ones provided. Then draw three to six gestures of different poses. Take your time with this and remember to keep it simple. Don't focus on details, and instead focus on the movement of the pose. If you need, repeat the same poste more than once. You'll improve with each dry. Just have fun and relax. Once you're done, be sure to post your ae to drawings. I can't wait to see them. This is all for now. I'll see you in the next video for some final words. 12. Conclusion: Before You Go: Congratulations. You finished the course. I hope you had fun and learn a lot with these videos. I know this can be a lot of information to take in at once. Feel free to rewatch the videos as much as you want and follow along with your own drawings. If you have any questions or need any help, don't hesitate to ask me. I'll reply as soon as possible. If you can lead me anonymous review to this course, that will make my day. It allows me to keep creating new courses and updating old ones. All right. That's about it for now. Thank you for watching, and I hope to see you again in other of my courses. As always, keep on drawing.