Transcripts
1. Gesture Drawing - The Key to Drawing Life: [MUSIC] Hi, there. Thank you for checking
out this class. My name is Siobhan. This is Drawing Life, a complete guide to a dynamic and expressive
approach to drawing. This class is all about one specific technique
called gesture drawing, that will help you to
unlock all of your drawing. This class is not
just for artists, it's not solely for
figure drawing students, it's for anyone who wants to unlock their own creative voice and anyone who wants to discover their unique drawing language. The first thing
that we're going to do is look at materials. I'm going to demystify the myriad drawing tools
that are available to you, I'm going to help you navigate which tools to
choose for yourself, and which will help you to draw responsibly
and intuitively. [MUSIC] Next up, we look at techniques
of gesture drawing. These are the techniques, so we'll kick-start a fluid
and natural drawing style. These techniques are
learnable and you can use them to train
yourself how to draw, and ultimately,
they will serve you as a method of discovery
through drawing. Then finally, we'll dive
into five drawing projects. We're going to
draw a still life, we'll also do plant life, we will also draw a pet life. Don't worry if you
don't have a pet, my lovely studio
assistant, Jesse, will gladly pose for you, we'll make a drawing
of cafe life, and finally, we'll
draw a full figure. Each of these
projects is going to experiment with five
different subjects to ensure that you
really get a feel for this powerful and
expressive way of drawing. By the end of the class, you'll have had a
transformative experience, I have no doubt. Understanding your mark making , understanding your subject, and unlocking how your
mark connects you to what it is you're drawing
is truly eye-opening. This will be the start of a brand new way of
thinking about drawing, thinking about your work, and thinking about
yourself as a creative. I can't wait to get started, I'll see you in class. [MUSIC]
2. Introduction: [MUSIC] Welcome, to the class. I'm so glad that you're here. In this class, I want you to
be able to break free from any constraints
around your drawing or your idea of drawing, and I invite you to
just experiment. Both with the joint
tool that you use and the marks
that they make, but also with your
own observation and your own response to your subject matter or the
thing that you'll be drawing. I'm going to spend
the first few lessons to explain what
gesture drawing is, what this approach is all about, as well as how to see the
gesture in your subjects. Then I'll walk you through the processes and the
techniques involved and get you comfortable drawing in a way you might not
normally be used to. After that, we're
going to work through five specific drawing projects. Each one will have a
certain technique or style of gesture drawing
attached to it that you can experiment
with and explore. We'll start out with a
simple still life drawing. After that, we'll progress
to drawing plant life. From there the next
drawing project will be a pet or animal. Taking it one step further, we'll then go outside, into the outside world and do a drawing in a cafe
or a coffee shop. Then finally we'll work up
to a full figure drawing, bringing all of the techniques together in one final piece. I'm going to encourage
you to share your work in the
project gallery, not only to get feedback from me but also so that
you can inspire your fellow students
and get inspiration yourself from seeing
other students work. Feel free to drop a comment at any time during the class
in the discussion tab. I'm here every day and I'll be able to respond to any
questions that you have. If something is unclear
make sure just to leave me a quick message and
I'll get back to you. Let's get started. In the next lesson, I'm going to discuss what I think
gesture drawing is, and we'll have a working
definition going forward. Then we'll move
into the techniques and exercises. [MUSIC]
3. What is Gesture Drawing?: [MUSIC] In this introductory lesson, I'm going to try to define
what gesture drawing is so that we have something of a working definition
going forward. A gesture drawing really
doesn't have to be detailed. It doesn't have to be
precise or even correct. For example, a gesture drawing of the human figure doesn't have to have detailed anatomy or
even correct proportions. Instead, what it
does is it captures the movement or the direction of the pose that
the model takes. This can be really
difficult at the beginning because we just naturally
want to draw correctly. We want our drawings to have proper proportions and
have correct details. But here's the
thing I'd like you to know from the very outset. The first and most important
thing about gesture drawing. Gesture drawing is a
way to draw something other than the details
or the proportions. It's a way of drawing
that can capture the energy or the
essence of your subject. So very simply put, gesture drawing is a
very loose free way of drawing that aims to
capture the energy or essence. That's more or less the way
I describe gesture drawing. There are a lot of
different views on gesture drawing and
across the Internet, you will surely come across other ideas or
opinions about this. Some people like to
think of gesture drawing as just a way to
simplify the subject. A way of drawing something
that breaks it down into simplified shapes
or simple curved lines. Some people think of gesture
drawing as a quick sketch, something that's done
in a few seconds, that's throwaway and it's
a sketch and nothing more. Some people think of gesture drawing as
just a way to warm up. There are a lot
of different ways to approach gesture drawing, just as there are a lot
of different ways to approach drawing
or art in general. In this class, I'm
going to teach you the approach
that I was taught, and I'm passionate about sharing this because this really
was a catalyst for me and it transformed the way I understood
what drawing could achieve beyond being just a copy or a photo likeness
of something. For me, yes, gesture
drawing is a way of drawing that captures the energy or the essence of something. But within that definition lies two of the most important
aspects of drawing. Expression and observation. If you can learn to be
expressive and have control over the marks that you
make or the way you use the pencil across the page. If you can combine that
with a way of looking that goes beyond just
the 2D visual aspects, then you can unlock
a powerful way of drawing that's unique to you. [MUSIC] One of the best
ways to experience deep observation and experience
your own mark-making or your own expression is through the practice
of gesture drawing. But there is one other
technical aspect that we need to bear in mind when
we're discussing what is gesture drawing. That is that gesture
drawings are very fast, fluid, and quick. You wouldn't necessarily spend hours on a gesture drawing. You normally only
spend a couple of minutes or even a few seconds. The reason behind this
is going to help you to further understand
what gesture drawing is. When you're drawing from life or even if you're
drawing from a photo, when you first look
at your subject, you immediately
get an impression. You always get a split-second
first impression of your subject as a whole, a unified, cohesive thing. It's a really important
skill to develop as an artist to be able to understand your first
impression of something. What the practice of
gesture drawing does is that it helps you
or it trains you to translate that first
impression that you get onto the paper through
your mark-making. No matter how complex or
difficult your subject is, you can trust that your split-second impression
is unique, it's vital, and you can draw that
as directly as you can through the practice
of gesture drawing. [MUSIC]
4. Mark Making and Observation: [MUSIC] So as I said in the previous lesson, there are two aspects of gesture drawing that
are really important. That is observation or how you see something and expression, which is your mark making. So these two aspects
are really intertwined. They inform each other. They're not separate or
distinct components. Mark making is how
you use lines and tones and shading to be able to describe what
it is that you see. I'm going to explain later
on some of the techniques that you can use to
develop your mark making, to practice making
different kinds of dynamic or expressive marks. That's going to
help you build up your own unique
vocabulary of marks. We're going to look
at different kinds of drawing tools and
what marks they give, as well as different kinds of paper or support to draw on. But in this lesson I
want to talk quickly about observation
because I think there's aspect of observation
that we don't often realize is going on or is
happening in the background. That is simply that as an artist when you're
looking at something, you're really seeing
it or understanding it with so much more than
just the sense of sight. What I mean by that is whether
you realize it or not, you're always
looking at something with all of your senses. When you look at something, you know what it feels like to the sense of
touch, for example. You also know the
sense of volume that it takes within space, the shape of it. You know maybe what it tastes like or what it smells like. You even have memories
or emotions that you can draw on and
literally draw with. So all of your senses, your sense of memory or emotion, and even your sense of
understanding and knowledge, all of this comes into play when you look at your subjects. So the implication of this
is that as an artist, you don't just look
with your eyes, but you look through your eyes. In this way drawing is
almost like thinking. Drawing is the expression of how you think and
understand your world. In that sense, a drawing
can be so much more than just a copy or a replica
of something that exists. Can be a way of
showing us how you understand the world
and the objects in it. So to practice this
deep observation, I want you to start to practice seeing the gesture
in everything. Everything has a gesture. You can think of it
as an energy and in very practical terms as a
very basic starting point, you can start to look
for lines of movement. Lines of direction
or movement through any object will usually point to the gesture
of that object. Movement always equals energy. If you look at an object and
you see one part going in one one and another part
going in another direction, that's the movement flow
within that object. The energy is the thing that
unifies all of these parts. [MUSIC] So it will
become more clear as we get into the drawing
projects later on how to see the gesture. But just start practicing or just start being
aware of that now as we move through
the next few lessons. [MUSIC]
5. Why Use This Technique: [MUSIC] Having explained why I think gesture drawing is
a powerful way of drawing, and explain what I think
you can achieve with it through observation
and mark-making, in this lesson, I want
to talk a little bit more about why I think
you should use it. You might think gesture
drawing is not really for me, I prefer to draw very nice
detailed and careful studies. I thought I would
just talk about why I thought gesture drawing needed
a whole class on its own. The first reason is because
I really think gesture is overlooked as a legitimate
way to learn how to draw. It's overlooked as an
important approach to drawing in general. There's so much emphasis
placed on drawing properly and correctly and having
perfect looking drawings, especially I think if
you're drawing from photos. Because you just
tend naturally to compare your drawing to
the photo reference. A lot of people simply find that way of drawing
a little bit restrictive, or they find that they don't achieve an
exact photo likeness, and therefore they think that
their drawing is not good. You might think that if you
can't get the details or the proportion or the anatomy
correct in figure drawing, you might think that you've
failed at figure drawing, and that's completely
not the case. That's really important
to me to be able to put this class
together to help people understand that there's
a lot more going on in a drawing than just
simply capturing a likeness. I wanted to share
this technique of gesture drawing as a
support or a basis to always go back to
when you feel that you're struggling in
your drawing practice. The second reason why I
thought this needed a class on its own is really
at the end of the day, this way of drawing, I should say, is a
technique to explore. I'm not saying that you
necessarily have to draw like this in every
drawing that you do, the ultimate end goal of a journey through
gesture drawing is really to discover your
own voice as an artist. Eventually you can dispense off these exercises or
techniques and just draw naturally and responsibly
in your own natural style. Making messy marks as
frustrating as it might feel when you want to make a
perfect flawless drawing, it really is the fastest way to show you where your
creative spirit lives and how to help you find or even hear your
own artistic voice. Even if you know
that you prefer to draw very careful
academic drawings, learning gesture drawing
as a technique ultimately helps you to have confident
and controlled line work. That's really going to feed into those more careful
and detailed studies. I think it's really
important to be able to control your mark and control your line
work with confidence. For those reasons, I think gesture drawing
should be a part of your skill set because
no matter what art you want to ultimately do, it is going to help
you to achieve it.
6. What Materials to Use for this Class: [MUSIC] For this class, you can use any drawing
materials that you like. You don't have to go out and
buy special drawing tools. If you just have pen and paper to work on,
that's totally fine. But in this lesson, I did want to show you
the drawing tools that I have and what I used in my
figure drawing practice. Charcoal is by far the most preferred tool for artists when it comes
to gesture drawing, especially drawing the figure. Now in a live drawing session
or something like that, most people tend to
draw with charcoal, but also for landscape
artists and Urban Sketchers. Charcoal is wonderful because
it's a medium that creates really dynamic and
a diverse range of marks really easily. For this class, there really are just two types of
charcoal that I use that would be compressed
charcoal or winnow charcoal, compress charcoal is very dark, it's very dense
and it tends to go all over your hands as soon
as you start handling it. I usually just break
the sticks down to make smaller pieces and I
draw with the side to get these sweeping
shaded marks to cover large areas or I'll use the very tip and draw
thinner lines like this. The other common
charcoal that you get is willow or vine charcoal. It comes in very long
thin sticks and again, you can just break them up. It's much lighter
than compressed. You don't get quite so
dark with vine charcoal, but it's easier to work
with and it's not so messy. You can move the marks around and you can smudge
them and blend them. Then a third option
is a charcoal pencil. That's a bit easier again, and it's probably a
better tool to draw with if you're working
in your sketchbook. Definitely not as messy. You don't get the
same dynamic range, but you'll certainly be able
to draw from light to dark. I personally find charcoal
pencils are a bit more expressive than
graphite pencils. But if you just have
a graphite pencil, make sure you're using say, a B or 2B or
something like that. For erasers, you don't really need one for
gesture drawing. But I wanted to show you
this eraser that I use. It's called a kneaded eraser. It's very soft and malleable
and you can mold it into a shape and what people do is generally use it
as a drawing tool. You can actually make marks with the eraser as opposed to
erasing out your marks, you can use it as
a drawing tool. So it's quite a
useful thing to have. But again, if you don't
have this eraser, it's not essential at all. In fact, if you don't
have any of these, you can also use a
regular ballpoint pen. I actually love
drawing with a pen. It's very fluid and you can get a surprising amount of different marks if you use
crosshatching effects. I'll actually be
using a pen that later on in the class projects. So I'll just quickly mention the paper that I've drawn
when working with charcoal, I generally use something
called newsprint paper. Newsprint is made literally from the paper that they
use for newspapers, if not newspapers
themselves, I'm not sure, but the point is that
it's very smooth, it's very soft paper, it's great for charcoal. Just be aware though, that it is very thin
and the problem with newsprint is that it
yellows over time. In fact, it yellow is quite quickly and if you make a
drawing that you want to keep, newsprint is not the best paper because over a matter
of a few weeks, if you read the paper out, it will turn yellow. But for gesture drawing, newsprint is great and
gesture drawings are ultimately really the
explorations of your marks. While I definitely think that a gesture drawing can be a
beautiful finished artwork, what you want to do
when you're just moving into gesture
for the first time, is try to make as many
throwaway drawings as you can. Again, it's all
about the process, not really about the outcome. So for that reason, you want to work on inexpensive, cheap paper if you're not going to exactly keep the drawings. However, I do have a couple of sketchbooks that
I'm going to work in. If you've got a sketchbook
lying around, that's great. I pick these up in the Art Shop. They've got pretty
decent quality paper and they're soft back. So that's nice to
carry around with me. But I also bought this one
which I couldn't resist. It has a hard back
and it has lovely toned paper inside
which looks so great. I think something like pen or ink is going to look
very nice on this paper. So I'm going to give
that a go as well. Those are all of my materials. Let me know if you
have any questions or if you're wondering about
something in this regard, just send me a message
I'll help you out if you need help deciding
which materials to use. Otherwise, I will see
you in the next lesson.
7. Setting Up for Drawing: [MUSIC] There are definite techniques that you can use to
try and unlock a dynamic or in an expressive
way of drawing and in the next few lessons
I'm going to go over some of these
techniques before we get into the drawing
projects themselves. That's not to say that this is the only way that you
can do gesture drawing, or this is the only way that you can make an expressive mark. It's totally up to you. But these exercises
or techniques that I'll show you
are starting points to help you kick-start your own unique expressive
way of drawing. They are starting points to
help you explore how you make a mark when you're drawing instinctively and responsively. I would suggest that when you're exploring mark-making
and how you draw, you can listen to
music if that helps. Sometimes that really
helps me to get into a more of a flow state
when it comes to drawing. The first thing that I want to discuss before we even get to drawing [LAUGHTER] is how
you sit when you're drawing. The way you sit can really
affect the way you draw. It's often much better for a more dynamic and
expressive way of drawing to draw standing. That way you'll just
naturally have more access to your own energy and that
feeds into your drawing. If you go to a live drawing
or a figure drawing class, people generally try
to draw standing up. But if you are sitting down then try sitting
down like this. You might be very used to
drawing only like this, but I would encourage you to start today to break that habit. At the very least,
sit straighter, try to draw from your elbow
if you can, or your shoulder. This takes a bit of practice, but it's going to really improve the confidence in
your line work. As I said, if you don't
have an easel and you can't draw standing
up, that's totally fine. What you can also do to try and match drawing on an easel is to prop your sketchbook up against the table or even use the
back of another chair. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about
mark-making and what you can expect when we start to get
into the drawing projects.
8. Warm Ups: [MUSIC] Techniques for gesture drawing are ultimately your own. Whatever marks you make, if they are in harmony with the way that
you're observing, they're going to ring
true in your drawing. When we move into the drawing
projects, for each one, I'm going to prescribe
or suggest that you use a specific technique or a
specific way of making marks. I would encourage you to treat each one as an experiment or a simple exercise and just try out using your drawing
tool in a different way. In this lesson, I
just wanted to run through the different
ways or styles of using your drawing tools
so that you know what to expect and you can practice. The specific marks
are going to include long sweeping marks like this. Again, for this,
you'll really need to use your whole
arm when you draw. You might even experiment holding your pencil
slightly differently. I can overhand
grip as opposed to drawing like you
would when you write. We'll also experiment with small circular scribbles marks, and we'll work to build these up over the course of
the drawing session. Another mark that
we'll use is to draw enlarged round circles. That has the same quality
as the sweeping mark, but you can try and just draw with consistent circular shapes. You can also use
crosshatching is another way of making your mark, or random hatching or
playing scribbles, that can also work. [MUSIC] Spend some time now just to practice each
one of these in turn. As you do, think about
what drawing tool you yourself would most like to use based on the
quality of these marks. It might be a pen, it might be charcoal
or something else. I wouldn't necessarily
insist that you use one drawing
tool over another. For now, it's totally up to you. I want you to practice
random experimental marks. Try to make up a whole page. Treat this as a warm-up
for the next phase, which is going to be
our drawing projects. When you're ready, I'll see
you in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
9. Project 1 - A Still Life: [MUSIC] For our first gesture
drawing project, we're going to
tackle a still life. I've set up a simple
still life with a bag, a hat, and a pair
of old sneakers. But you can choose any
objects that you like. When you are setting
up your still life, here are a couple of things
I'd like you to keep in mind. Try to stick to two
or three objects, and you can even just stick to one object if you
want to start out a little bit easier with the drawing projects,
that's totally fine. If you're choosing a
few objects though, try to vary the height of them. You don't want everything to
be the exact same height. Try and get one thing
that's a little bit taller than the others. Choose objects that
are not too complex, but are not too simple either. Avoid things with lots of parts, but also avoid having
three things that are just round shapes like
three round teapots, and also avoid things that
are too shiny or reflective. Then when you're ready, you
can set yourself a timer, five minutes, 10
minutes is fine. The technique that we'll use
for this drawing is to keep the pencil or the
pen in contact with the page throughout the
whole drawing session. Even if your timer is set
for 10 minutes or you get into the drawing and you
feel like you want to draw for longer than 10, just keep your pencil moving, keep it in contact
with the paper and don't stop the flow
of your drawing. [MUSIC] One of the benefits of this exercise, in particular, is that it helps you to really
get a feeling or a sense of how you can coordinate your hand movement
and your eye movement. Your marks or your pencil
movements come into alignments, become in sync with the way your eyes move
across the subject. Generally, when I start out, I will start at the top
and work my way down. But you can start
anywhere you like. But just once you do start, remember that you're keeping your pencil in contact
with the paper. I also tend to do quite
circular marks to get the feeling that I
am drawing around the object as well as
just drawing outlines. These sort of round gestural, loose lines help me to think of the object as 3D in a sense. I'm not trying to
get any details. I'm simply letting my eyes
move around these objects and then trying to get my pencil to follow
my eye movements. At first the drawing
might not be correct in terms of proportion
or placement. That's okay. These lines
are in a sense movable. What you'll find is
that you'll go over and back on the same
areas many times, and you might actually
decide to move your initial lines around by simply drawing new lines
over where they should be. The more you build
up your linework, the more definitive your
drawing will become. For example, I initially drew this sneaker in the wrong
position, was too small. All I do is just add in
more lines to move it back. I can make any corrections
by just simply redrawing over the
existing linework. For this exercise, you
can really think of your line as being
an exploratory line. You're using the line to map out your
composition and map out the still life and you're using your line to literally
explore these objects, explore the shape and contours as well as any details that you
might see within them. Having this in mind
is a wonderful way to get into that feeling or that sense of gesture work being a responsive
way of drawing. Because an exploratory way of drawing is never
going to be wrong. The emphasis really is
all about your linework, finding the objects
interesting and investigating them
in that sense. Keep this going for
a couple of minutes. It really doesn't have to be a long drawing session at all for this first
drawing project. Five minutes is plenty, but feel free to do a couple of these if
you feel like it or rearrange your still life into a different configuration
and do another drawing, and you'll be super surprised at how concentrated you can get if you spend a few
minutes doing this. You can see how your observation matches your mark-making. I hope you enjoyed this project. I hope you enjoy this exercise. When you're ready, meet
me in the next lesson and we'll move on to the second
gesture drawing project.
10. Project 2 - Drawing Directional Lines: [MUSIC] For our second drawing project, we're going to do a
gestural study of a plant. You can also draw a
tree if you like, but a pot plant is fine. I've set up my pop plant
here, my monstera. It's quite a dramatic plant. You don't have to go
with something so big, but here are some of
the things that you can consider when you're
choosing your plant subject. Something not too small. It doesn't have to
be as big as mine, but definitely something that is not like a tiny
little pop plant, something that definitely
does have a bit of reach. Secondly, I'd like you to really try and draw
this one from life, but if you don't have a pop plant or you
really don't want to, then by all means you can
use the photo of my plant. If you can't get out and
draw a tree outside, then that will be amazing too. You could also try
doing a tree drawing after you've done
your pot plant study, try drawing a tree as an add-on. Again, you can set your timer
for five or 10 minutes. The drawing technique that
we're going to explore in this project is
directional lines. Though, what you're
going to do is, for the first few minutes
of your drawing session, don't draw anything, just study the plant in front of you and look for
directional lines. Look for lines that flow
through the entire plant. It should be fairly obvious
that the growth and energy of the plant is
from the base upwards. In something like a plant or a tree that there are
directional lines going through the
plant from the bottom to the top and out
through the leaves. But I want you to also look for directions within that
overall composition. The stems might branch out
in opposite directions. What about the leaves? Are the leaves pointing ever
upwards or do they sometimes trail down and reach down
back towards the ground? [MUSIC] [NOISE] The first thing
that I'm going to do is try to judge through
direction lines, the overall height and
width of my composition. Very loosely and very lightly, I'm just trying to
map out the lengths and the directions that I
see in the plant before me. Like the previous exercise, I'm keeping the pencil
in contact with the page as I search
out this composition, but for this one you
don't necessarily have to rigidly stick to that. Now I'm looking at this main
stem and this one is going all the way over here
with a sweeping line. I'm just trying to match
that gesture that I see. In this instance, this plant is very complex. Some leaves are
quite foreshortened. There is one in the
front here that's much larger because
it's in the front. Overall, don't get too worried about your perspective
or proportions here. Don't worry about getting
that exactly right. Just follow where you see lines, follow where you see directions. Once you've marked out just
the general reaching quality of a plant like this, you can also follow the
directions of the leaves. I'm working around the
edge of these big leaves, as well as through the leaf and that
often leads me to using these much
rounder sweeping marks. You can experiment with
that drawing style as well. Then when it comes
to the pots, well, that's very easy to block
out in terms of direction. Just a few simple lines
just to block it out. Now in the center here, where the plant comes out of the pot there is a
lot of activity, a lot of different directions
and I'm just trying my best to get some of
that into the drawing. The important thing
is to feel confident and in control of
the sweeping marks. Don't worry about
getting this wrong. No one's going to be looking at your drawing and
saying, well, hang on. That one leaf there was five
centimeters away, not 10. No one's going to be
judging it on that basis. They are going to be looking or if you show it to anybody, they'll be looking at the energy and the responsiveness
in the drawing. Again, think of this
as an exploration. Eventually you become
much more focused on the thing you're
drawing than the drawing itself and you'll start to experience something
of a connection with what you're drawing. When that happens, you'll also find that the more you look, the more you'll see, and what you thought
at first was a really simple four
or five leaf plant or very simple composition, the more you look
you'll find it's actually much more complex. You'll start to see
things you hadn't seen at first and start to notice shapes that you
hadn't seen at first. But that's the fun
of this process and that is what the
whole intention behind and exploration of your
subject is all about. Once you get an overall sense, then you can start to dial
into the details a little bit. At this point I'd
encourage you to keep thinking about
direction and keep thinking about fluid lines, even if you are trying
to draw smaller details. Another tip is, I
keep going back over my lines just like I
did in the last exercise, where you went over your
drawing again and again. Here too you can do the
same thing in one area. You can go over it
multiple times. You can move things
around and add to any part of the drawing
that you feel needs it. After just a few
minutes you'll start to see the lines within
the various shapes, like the lines of the leaves, all these smaller details, so keep going with this
until you feel that you've captured something of what you wanted to when
you started out. Until you feel that
you've captured that. In my case, I stopped drawing
when I felt that I had captured the a spaciousness
and size of this plant. Definitely stop drawing if you feel that you're
getting too small and too detailed because you don't need to do that just yet. But enjoy this drawing, enjoy this drawing project. I look forward to seeing
it in the project section. Let me know if you've got
any questions whatsoever. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson and we're going to
tackle drawing a pet. [MUSIC]
11. Project 3 - Drawing with Scribbles: [MUSIC] Our third
drawing project is going to be drawing a
pet or a small animal. The main aim of
this project is to introduce you to drawing
something that's alive and breathing and
possibly moving around but it's not quite yet a
person or a full figure. Starting with drawing a
pet is a great step from drawing objects towards
drawing people from life. But if you don't have
a pet or you don't have access to drawing
a small animal, then you can totally use the
photos of my dog, Jessie. She very kindly agreed to model for me for this
drawing session. The technique that
we're going to use for want of a better word
is scribble drawing. I don't necessarily
like that term, but it really best describes
this way of drawing. What you're going
to do is just use smaller round scribbly marks
to build up the drawing. It's best to use a pen for this drawing exercise because it gives you much more fluid
and free flowing lines. In much the same way as the drawing exercise
where we kept the pencil in contact with the page throughout the
whole drawing session, you can also do that here if you feel that it keeps you
connected to this process. But you can also
just feel free to pick your pencil up as you
move through the drawing. The idea though,
is to try and draw with small round
circuit remarks in areas of importance or areas of interest that
you feel need emphasis. In other words, as
I'm drawing here, I've got in my mind the overall
shape of my dog's head, for example but I'm focusing or in building
up the line work around areas such as the eyes
and the nose and the ears, different parts of the
subject that are going to be the most important to describing what
it is I'm seeing. It becomes much
more intuitive when you're in the flow of
this drawing because this is really where
your observation connects to your mark-making
in this exercise. Try to avoid making a nice perfect drawing of
your subject and simply use the pen to make scribbly
marks that are responding to what it is you're looking
at in that moment in time. With a pen, it's very easy
to build up mark slowly. I'm not pressing very
lightly at the beginning, but the more I go
over certain areas, the darker the tones become, and that gives the feeling of importance or even volume
as well to the drawing. Another aspect of
this is that it really speaks to the shape. Even though I'm just making what seems like
random scribbles, if you connect to
your observation, those random scribbles will start to form something
of the volume and the shape of the subject
that you're looking at and start to
bring it to life. I'm not in any way trying
to draw exact details. I'm really literally just
adding the pen build up areas of tone around those parts that I think
are the most important. Give this a go or just try and be fluid with your line work. I would probably
suggest that you could spend about up to 10 minutes on a drawing like this or
even longer if you do get into the drawing and
you want to keep it going. Like we did in the
very first project, if you find that your
line work or your marks that you first
started out with, that they're in the wrong
place after a while drawing, just draw over them. It doesn't really matter
because there's so much texture and marks built up
through these lines that it gives you the
option to draw over your work and to change your drawing
throughout the process. I'm just going to focus on drawing Jessie's
head for this one, and I think that's more than enough for this
drawing exercise. But I did want to show
you what might happen if your dog or your cat gets up and starts
moving around, because that's a
real possibility, and certainly that's
an opportunity to try and just draw while
something is moving. Later on in this
drawing session, Jessie did get up and start
stretching and moving around. I wanted to explain
that you've got a couple of options
when that happens. One option would
be to try and make extremely quick studies of just one part like for
example, the head. What I did was I worked when my dog was moving around
and I just worked on a page of very quick gestural studies
of Jessie's head, and again, just using
the small scribbly line work as quickly as I can. At this point, Jessie was
just sitting looking around. Every so often her
head would turn in a different direction
and I'd have to just try and very quickly draw
that silhouette or draw that shape that I see
as she turns her head. [MUSIC] Second option that
you can do and I got a good video here for you to show you exactly
how this went, she managed to get an empty
box and started attacking it. [LAUGHTER] What you can do in this situation if your pet
is moving around a lot, is just commit to
one angle or pose, and just keep drawing it. Even if your dog or cat turns their head and we don't see that same angle or
that same view, you can still
continue drawing it based on your memory
of the initial pose, but also by looking at your subjects or
looking at your pet, you can still pick up qualities that you can
put into the drawing. In this instance, she was definitely going off to
that box quite intently and moving around an
awful lot but I just kept working on one angle or one
pose if that makes sense. Still using this very
scribbly line work, measure how much she
changes her position. I have in my mind or I have
in my memory that snapshot or first impression impulse that I saw at the very beginning and I just keep working on that. It's an interesting process, definitely to draw something
that's moving this much. As I said, you can
do two options. You can try and do a series
of very quick studies, or you can just work
on one drawing, keep working on it, even if your subject
matter is moving, but still use your subject as a reference from
which to work. [MUSIC]
12. Project 4 - Selective Scribbles: [MUSIC] This project is aimed
at moving you one step closer to drawing
the human figure. Building on the
previous project, you can use a combination of
all of the techniques that we've explored or use one
technique in particular. But this time the focus will be on using your mark selectively. This really to me
is a crucial step along the path towards
gesture drawing. While all of the
previous projects have allowed you to be free and totally wild and
expressive with your marks, what you're going to
do now is try and reign that in and be very considerate and
intentional about the marks that you make. You will now learn to be selective in how
you use your marks. For this project, we're
going to head out and go to a coffee shop and draw
people moving around. This might sound
completely daunting. If you have done
cafe drawing before, you'll know it is
very challenging. But here's where I
want to show you a really easy way
to approach it. In cafe drawing or
drawing people from life, I tend to focus on
just a few things. I'll focus on the features of
the face such as the eyes, nostrils, and the mouth. I'll focus on specific areas of the clothing like the color, the shoulder, the
elbow, and the wrist. But once you focus on
just a few things, you will be surprised at
how much information that gives a drawing and how the drawing can come
together by itself. Doing this makes the whole
thing so much simpler. You don't have to draw the full person or capture
everything that you see, you're just focusing on very specific
points of reference and very specific
details to get down. It doesn't even matter if
they're in the wrong place, but it will make the
challenge a lot easier. For the technique, I tend
to use a scribbly line, but you can use any of the mark-making exercises
that we've done previously. For this drawing, I'm
just going to take my sketchbook and one pen. Keep it very simple,
not complicated. [MUSIC] If you're ready, get your sketchbook, your pen, and let's go grab a coffee. What I do when I go cafe drawing is the
first thing I'll do is have a walkthrough and try and
scope out the environment. See where people are gathered or sitting and just have a
look at the general layout. I try to choose a place to sit that's in the
corner or tucked away, but has a good view. If you happen to be in
a coffee shop that has a window or view adjacent to
the street or [inaudible], that is brilliant
because it's much easier to sit in a window
and look at it people. It's not so obvious [LAUGHTER]
if you're sitting right in the middle of everyone
and staring at people. Sometimes, if you don't want to draw attention
to yourself, you can draw with
your sketch book on your lap. That works for me. It's so important
to understand that when you're drawing
people from life, you don't really have to draw the whole thing as
I said earlier. You really can be selective. This helped me a huge deal in being able to tackle
this kind of drawing. Once you realize that
being selective and focusing or honing in
on specific areas, the risk can be
left free and open. You don't have to worry too
much about it or try to feel that you need to
capture the whole figure. That way you can be
much freer to respond, to draw instinctively
and to draw quickly. For the most part, I
focused here on just drawing people's
faces that I saw. Again, I tried to jot down
like where the eyes are, the nose, the bottom of
the nose, the mouth, and get a general sense
of people's faces. For this kind of drawing, be aware that the brain can fill in all of the
missing details. Very often leaving that space in your drawing for
the viewer to fill in the rest can actually make for a very
compelling drawing. It's much more open. It leaves the viewer some space to engage with the drawing instead of being given all of the information
that there is. You do have to work
quite quickly. People move around a lot. Like I said in the PEC drawing, a good tip is to
get a snapshot of somebody and hold that in your memory so that
if they do move, you can continue on
where you were drawing. But if you wanted to,
you could also just switch and start
drawing over again. Choose another person. What I noticed as well is that if I was drawing somebody
and they moved away, I'd move on to a
different drawing. But if they came back, you can always then go back to that original drawing and
continue working on it. The features of the
face actually become quite simple and quite easy. It's remarkable how just
three or four features or details such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, can be so completely and
radically different on each and every person. If you find yourself trying to draw what you think
an eye looks like, or what do you think a
nose or mouth looks like. Then my suggestion is focused on areas across the face
that you see in shadow. Draw those shadow
shapes or mark out on your page those
darker shadows areas. That will actually help you to stay away from trying to
draw something in detail. You might feel
that your drawings look really messy and they don't look at all like the person that you're
trying to draw. But this again, is just
a practice and it's just about [MUSIC] getting you
to tune into observation. Really just don't
worry too much about trying to make proper
portraits here at all. You can also try tackling full standing
figure if you like. If you've got the opportunity
to draw two people talking, that's always a good scene to capture and quickly get
down in your sketch book. Again my process is to try and hit those main areas of those main landmarks of
the figure like shoulders, elbows, the waist, the knees, and the feet. I don't bother too
much about getting too many details in. The last piece of advice I would say is that if you really don't feel that
your drawing is not working out or you're not
getting what you want to do, consider taking some photos of the cafe that
you're sitting in and going home and working on some sketches in your
sketch book at home. That's also totally fine. I think that once you've just being in situ or
being in the place and have that
experience of visually connecting to the
scene around you, you can definitely bring
that into your drawing at home when you're working from a photo reference
of the same place. That's also an option
if you find that drawing in real-life in a
coffee shop isn't for you, consider that as another option. Have fun with this
project and let me know if you've got any
questions relating to this. Let me know if you want to talk through any
questions that you have. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and
we're going to go into the last of our
drawing projects.
13. Project 5 - Drawing a Full Figure: In this last drawing
project we've reached what I think is the
heart of gesture drawing. That is the ability
to use lines or marks to capture a sense
of life in your drawing. This really is what gesture
drawing is all about. Ideally, we would be in a
position where we could draw a model from life
using gesture drawing. But for this project, we're going to use photo
references to try and understand and practice
drawing a full figure. Drawing the figure is a
whole subject unto itself, and I do have a full
class on Figure Drawing, which you can check out
if you're interested. I highly encourage
you to try out alive figure drawing
session as soon as you can. Because drawing in-person
with a live model is just vastly different
from drawing from a photo, a photo static. It's unmoving, it's precomposed. And ultimately you're
just drawing a photo. When you're drawing from life, the person there is living,
breathing, often moving. There are other people
working beside you. There's a real dynamic
between artists and model, and all of that has a powerful bearing on
the drawing itself. So try to go to a life
drawing session as soon as you can or as we
did in the last lesson. You know, draw people
from life and a cafe or try to get one of
your family members or friends to sit for you. But in this project, I'm
going to just show you that process that I use for drawing figures
using a couple of reference images that
I got from Pinterest. The easiest way to
see the gesture in the human figure is to look for the direction of
the overall pose. That is to say the shape
that the body is making, as well as look for
directions between the parts. So in this example, the head here is tilted
back in one direction. The body is making a
sort of a C curve and this leg is sweeping
down in this direction. First of all, draw your
directional lines very lightly. Think about that
early project we did when we were
drawing the plant. And the aim is to get big sweeping marks that go
through the whole body. So now at least there
is a general sense of the flow and movement
throughout the drawing. And that's a great
starting point. It's very easy to get overwhelmed when you're
drawing the figure. To think that you
have to draw all of the anatomical details correctly in order to make
the drawing right. But again, try to
keep it very simple. Try to think about the
movement between each parts. Movement equals life and the human figure
is built to move. So focusing on that aspect is definitely going to bring
life into your drawings. Don't get caught
up in the details. As I said, an
especially don't get caught up the way I
did in this drawing. I got a bit stuck on the
features of the face. I would say avoid drawing the
features of the face if you can just focus on the
rest of the figure. Think also about the process of scribble drawing or the way we worked in the first
drawing where you keep going over your
drawing again and again to build up the definition
slowly over time, use a searching
line to find edges, to find the width and the shape, and define details and form. I would ignore shadows unless
you really see them as interesting shapes to also include or points to add
to the flow of the forms. If you look at this
drawing, you know, there are some careful outer contour lines
around the edges, for example, the legs. But for the most part. This line is a searching
scribble line. It moves all around the place in order to
figure out complex parts. Like we did in the
cafe drawing exercise, I tried to focus on specific anatomical
points along the way. Those major landmarks
of the figure. Shoulders, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, elbow,
wrist, and fingers. If you draw from
point-to-point like this, it's much easier than thinking. You have to draw the whole, entire skeletal structure
or muscular structure. In this second drawing, the pose is very
dramatic, very dynamic, and that's obviously
the main energy that you want to capture
in a pose like this. Very often we don't really
draw these dynamic pose as well simply because we
have a natural tendency, believe it or not, just to
straighten up the figures. What I would suggest if you
tackle a drawing like this is to really exaggerate the angle of this
dancers posture. The more you push your drawing, the more you
exaggerate that angle, the more energy and
clarity you'll achieve. Because strangely
enough, even if you feel that you're
exaggerating the pose, you're likely just
managing to get it right. So try to really exaggerate those tilts and
twists in the body. In this drawing, I'm
using quite a lot of circular round Marx
to describe volume. The figure in this
image is very striking. But don't feel you need to draw the muscle
shapes individually, like you would in an academic
sort of anatomical study, tried to capture synergy and roundness through the
circular gesture lines. Hopefully, in this last project, you'll see how each of the
previous exercises that we've done have built up a series
of techniques that all, that all can come
together in one drawing. You can draw with
a continuous line like we did with the still life. You can draw with sweeping
directional lines like we did in plant life. You can also use scribble marks, cross hatching when you, when we did a pet life study. And above all, you
can be selective, intentional about where and how you placed any
of these marks.
14. How to See the Gesture in the Human Figure: In this video, I
want to give you one simple tip or one piece of advice that will
really help you to see the gesture in any pose. So on the one hand gesture is how you make
marks on the page. It's your mark making. It's really the two things
are very intertwined. How you draw across the page is your unique and
distinctive signature. And on the other hand, the gesture is also
the movement or the dynamic quality that
you see in the model. So really your marks
or your gesture should match the gesture
that you see in the pose. The easiest, most
basic way to see the gesture in any pose is
to look for the movement. I'm going to pull up some
images that I just did a really quick search on
Pinterest for gesture poses. And there are loads
here to choose from. But let's just start
with this idea of movement as a basis for
finding the gesture. Gesture is often described as the energy or the
essence of a pose. But it's really helpful
to look for movement. First of all, always
ask yourself, what is the direction
of the pose? That's going to be the most obvious pointer to the gesture. And the most obvious way to capture that is through
a line of action. A line of action will give you one overall basic
movement of the pose. But the thing is, is
that it's just one line. It's not a drawing. It doesn't really
say enough and it doesn't fully describe the pose. It simply tells you the
direction of the pose. It is useful as a
starting point, but to continue the drawing, you need to start to look for movement throughout
the whole figure. The entire figure is always going to have
various movements. The legs for one
movement or direction, the torso forms another. The arms also formed
their own movements. And then within each of them, the anatomy plays a rhythm
that you can look for and describe as movement
or direction as well. So look at it nationally. Not just as a still
life, but as movements. Think about those
anatomical features that are actually built to move. And especially if, if you're in a live figure
drawing session, that sense of how
the forms move, how they're built to move,
much more aware of it. So looking at key
anatomical markers like the muscles shapes or the
underlying bone structure, looking at the round volume, all of these aspects
are going to show you the rhythm and
flow of the pose. So that's my advice. If you're really stuck on how to get started with gesture, look for that rhythm,
flow and movement. It's as good a place
as any to start from. And then to draw the gesture, use your marks in a way that matches that flow or that
rhythm that you see. In other words,
let your barks be much more free-flowing
than you normally would. Draw. Allow them to go
outside the forums, allow them to go
around the form and don't restrict
yourself to drawing these outlines or two trying to get the
proportions right. And wherever you
do, above all else, don't use a gesture line
to draw a flat 2D outline. Tried to incorporate the sense of volume into your drawing. If you have a problem with
the idea of free flowing, if it sounds a bit too
abstract and silly, just try it as a
discipline drawing drove. See this as nothing more
than a drawing exercise. You don't have to
keep the drawings. You can just use it to try and develop your
mark making it, and just see what kind of dynamic range of marks you
can make in one drawing. It's also a good
exercise to see if you can draw instinctively and
if you can draw intuitively. And that can be a really
nice counterbalance to very careful studied, detailed and detailed
anatomy drawings. Overall, I think this is a really good starting
points, as I said. And I think the
more you work with this approach or this exercise, its color to more connected, you will get to your drawing. You'll start to see
that gesture really is a unifying aspect
throughout the whole pose. You can give it any definition that you want that makes sense. But ultimately,
gesture is a cohesive, unified expression
of what you see. It definitely comes
with practice. Maybe it can develop
over time for you, or maybe it's an instant
breakthrough for you once you start
to work with it. But it is an approach
that is going to help you fully understand your
own drawing language. Gesture will teach you
not only how to draw, but how to learn to draw. And because of that,
you will always have a method for discovery
through your own marks. The true nature of artistic creation isn't a set of rules that you
apply to your work. It's really a process. And your job as an artist
is to uncover that process. I think the fastest way to do that is through gesture drawing.
15. Three Tips for Drawing a Timed Pose : In this video, I want to give you three tips that
I think are really important to think about or to try and achieve in
your gesture drawings. So what I'm gonna do is show the reference image and the
timer and tried to break down the way that I
capture the pose in a shorter time-frame as
one minute or two minutes. Both of these poses are taken
from line of action.com. So go and check
that website out. It's a great online
resource for figures, for figure drawing students. Tons of poses to draw. I will say I usually spend a lot of time at the start
of any drawing session, like flipping through
the images to try and find a
good pose to draw. My first tip when you're doing
gesture drawing is to try as quickly as possible
to get the whole pose down in one
go on your page. So this to me is really the
key to gesture drawing, to identify or to see
the figure as one unit. And to try and get that impression of that
whole unit down on the page. Obviously, the easiest way to do that is with something
like a line of action. But the line of action doesn't have to correlate to the figure. For the whole drawing. You can use it just
as a starting point. So at this stage,
I'm already working back up from the bottom
of the drawing to the top and looking to describe that volume or that twist
through my line work, I often use a circular
motion in my line work or round circular marks to also try and describe
the whole pose. My second tip is that
another good thing to do, which I always try and encourage people is to draw through the forums and to avoid drawing the outlines or avoid drawing
the figure as a silhouette. A lot of times beginner drawing students will use
a gesture line, but use it just to draw what
they see as the outline. And I recommend that you try and follow lines that go
through the body, as well as lines that
go around the edges. When you're drawing
lines that go through, you can obviously sometimes see skeletal shapes
or muscle shapes, but you can also draw the direction of the
arms or the legs. That's another good
way to draw through lines that goes a long way to describe in weight
and volume as well. Right? So on this drawing
that's two minutes done, and this drawing is pretty
much like that's the most that needs to be said in a gesture study like this one, this two minutes is up, so I'm going to move on
to the second drawing. My third tip is to remember
that for short gesture poses, try to think of this way of drawing as capturing movement. The body is built for
movement, built for motion. And really if you
think about it, every part of the
figure connects into the hole with the
purpose of moving. So if you can capture movement
through your line work, I think he can go, that goes a long way to adding life and energy to your drawing instead of just making it like a static rendering
or a flash image. So think about movement
in your lines. Even if the model is static or the pose or reference
image that you're looking at obviously
is not moving. Especially if it's a photo, you can still spot tension and balance and dynamic
qualities like that. These all point towards the way that forms
are built to move. So trying to understand that
movement through the figure, through your line work is
key to gesture drawing. Another thing to point
out is that I normally don't set the timer for myself, but I think it is quite
a good idea every now and again to put a time
limit on your drawing, especially if you're
practicing gesture drawing. Because gesture is all
about an economical, direct response to what you see. I'm putting a time limit. Honors can really help you to hone Nash response or
hone that expression.
16. Final Thoughts - the power of gesture drawing: [MUSIC] In this last lesson, I'd like to just offer
a few words about how I think this approach can
help you in your drawing. How it can transform your
work and transform you. In the beginning,
I mentioned how making loose expressive marks or gesture drawing can kick-start a natural and
fluid drawing style, but it can also work as a
method of artistic discovery. What I mean by that
is simply that you now have a way of drawing, that is a method of inquiry. Your linework offers a way to discover something
about the subject. Your lines, your marks have
become an exploration. The way you draw now taps
into your intuition and it bridges you to your drawing
and your subject matter. This is where there are no rules about how
you should draw or how a drawing should
have lights and shadow, and all these technical aspects. This is just about you
and your line engaging with and interacting with your
drawing and your subject. This is your process that you have discovered
through drawing. We've all seen
drawings of figures, plants, landscapes, faces. Why is it that we
need to see any more? Surely, the best
ones have been done. We want to see more
because we want to see how you see us. I really believe that
gesture drawing unlocks a method that
describes how you see, how you see and feel
beyond the visuals. Once you've unlocked
your own expression, then you can add all of the parameters, the
technical aspects, the rules in order to hone your work into a
finished artwork, but it starts with
your expression. That's why gesture
drawing has the power to transform your work
and to transform you. Thanks so much for being here, for taking time to be
in this class with me. I really hope that
you enjoyed us. I really hope that
you have started a journey of discovery that will really be journey of a lifetime. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you
in the next class.
Siobhan Twomey, Artist, Illustrator, Instructor
