How to do Gesture Drawing: Drawing Life | Siobhan Twomey | Skillshare
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How to do Gesture Drawing: Drawing Life

teacher avatar Siobhan Twomey, Artist, Illustrator, Instructor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Gesture Drawing - The Key to Drawing Life

      2:27

    • 2.

      Introduction

      2:16

    • 3.

      What is Gesture Drawing?

      4:10

    • 4.

      Mark Making and Observation

      3:39

    • 5.

      Why Use This Technique

      3:11

    • 6.

      What Materials to Use for this Class

      5:50

    • 7.

      Setting Up for Drawing

      2:16

    • 8.

      Warm Ups

      2:37

    • 9.

      Project 1 - A Still Life

      5:13

    • 10.

      Project 2 - Drawing Directional Lines

      10:10

    • 11.

      Project 3 - Drawing with Scribbles

      8:43

    • 12.

      Project 4 - Selective Scribbles

      10:37

    • 13.

      Project 5 - Drawing a Full Figure

      10:35

    • 14.

      How to See the Gesture in the Human Figure

      6:56

    • 15.

      Three Tips for Drawing a Timed Pose

      5:09

    • 16.

      Final Thoughts - the power of gesture drawing

      2:29

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About This Class

What is GESTURE DRAWING? There are so many different explanations, and this technique is so important to develop as an artist. In this class you will learn what gesture drawing is, you'll learn the techniques of gesture drawing, and you'll also learn how to use it to draw the figure or to draw anything.

Gesture Drawing is the key to a dynamic and expressive way of drawing. Learning to see the gesture in anything, and to be able to draw that gesture will help you to bring life into your work, and it will help you to unlock your own voice through drawing.

Gesture is at the heart of life drawing, figure drawing and is a powerful way to draw in general!

When I started out drawing, my figure drawings were terrible. They were flat, stiff and looked like boring figurines, not like actual people. I had the opportunity to learn about gesture drawing and learn the power of observation, and this completely transformed my drawing. It also transformed my learning path, and was the key to new opportunities in wok and in my life. Not only did I gain confidence in my drawing, but I gained confidence in myself because my work was a true expression.

So I wanted to share this powerful process with you and help you to achieve a way of drawing that is true to who you are, one that can express YOU as an artist, and is also a way of drawing that captures the look and feel of any subject with a profound insight.

This class is not just for artists; this class is not just for figure drawing students; this class is for anyone who wants to unlock their own creative voice and discover their unique drawing language.

Gesture drawing is often overlooked as a powerful way to learn how to draw, this technique is one of the best ways to tap into your own unique creativity and expression.

Gesture can kick start a natural and fluid drawing style, but it can also work as a method of artistic discovery through experimental and exploratory line work.

I am passionate about sharing this approach and I know from experience how it can transform your work, so I hope you join me in this class and learn how to tap into your own voice through drawing.

There are 5 drawing projects to work through and each one uses a specific drawing technique that will help you to expand your creative, drawing vocabulary. The projects build from one to the other over the course of the lessons, and by the final project you will get to use all the exercises in one final piece.

I'm here to give you feedback and answer any questions! So I hope you join me and start an exciting drawing journey today. 

See you in class :)

Meet Your Teacher

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Siobhan Twomey

Artist, Illustrator, Instructor

Top Teacher

My newly released The Gesture Drawing Workbook is now available to purchase. This guide will demystify Gesture Drawing and give you clear and detailed instruction on how to apply this transformative drawing technique to your Figure Drawing. Drawing the human body is about DRAWING LIFE: this guide to true gesture drawing is based on Kimon Nicolaides' groundbreaking work with students at the Art Student League in New York, and it will change the way you understand figure drawing.

Click here to purchase: The Gesture Drawing Workbook

Click here to purchase The Beginner's Guide to Figure Drawing

Click here to purchase High Resolution Fine Art Prints

I also offer 1:1 coaching for drawing.
I have over 20 years experience as Figure Draw... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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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.