Gesture Drawing - a seven day adventure

I said I was gonna start sharing the studying I've been doing, so here I am :D 

If there's one way to sum up how I've been feeling the past few weeks, it's that I'm committed to change. I don't like how things are going, so I'm gonna act different, to get different, and one of my first steps in that direction was seriously doing gesture drawings. 

I think all artists - and people in general, really - struggle with a little bit of hypocrisy. It's not a bad thing, we're just not great at practicing what we preach, even when we are very good at preaching, haha. 

I readily admit to mine; for years, artists who liked my work, and maybe looked up to me, would ask me how to improve their anatomy, intuition, confidence, motion, etc, and for years I would tell them that the best way was with gesture drawings. Even if you only did a couple of them a day for a while, it's so much better than not doing any, or trying to learn everything just with one drawing. 

Except... I've never actually tried to do that, myself! 

I've done gesture drawings now and again, over the years, sure, but I never took them very seriously, or stuck with them for more than a day or two. I've known for a while that it was a direct cause for many of the struggles I had with my art, too, which made it all the more frustrating. Why am I telling people to do something that I don't even do? How can I really vouch for it? I wouldn't want to be on the other side of it, where someone tells me I should do something to improve, but they don't even make the time for it themselves. 

So, enough of that. 

My goal was to do gesture drawings once a day, preferably in the beginning of the day, for as many days in a row as I could, and see if I could really integrate them into my day to day art/life routine, and into my creative process. As the title suggests, I only managed a week consecutively, but I feel like I learned a lot in that time, and starting tomorrow, I'm going to get back into it again, hopefully for even longer. 

I skipped embedding a couple of the pictures within post, so it wasn't too ungodly long, haha. For the whole week's worth of gestures, check the ZIP attached to this post!

I did these all using Line Of Action's figure drawing tool, by the way. Totally recommend it!

Day one

I did a handful of 30-second gestures, but then the rest weren't timed at all. I was super rusty, so trying to do them in such a small amount of time was only stressing me out; making me take guesses and draw haphazardly, rather than actually look at the pose and try to find the movement.

Day two

These gestures were still un-timed (and I keep doing that for most of the week), but much easier than the first day. I definitely like that I slowed down. 

Day three

Not as many gestures, but I did still sit and do some! I don't recall why there weren't as many, I may have been multitasking. 

Day four

I'm starting to learn what shortcuts I can take, and I re-discover the importance of a true line of action - one simple line that explains the energy of the pose, from the head or fingertips, down to the toes. I realize that I don't need to draw fast, I need to draw efficiently, in order to capture the essence and energy of a pose without spending too much time noodling around. The gestures where I feel like I'm able to do this are consistently the ones I'm most happy with in the end. 

Day five

These gestures were done way late at night, and that was definitely the wrong way to go about it. If day for had me finally feeling like I could see and feel the motion in these poses, on day five, I felt totally disconnected from that. I could barely pick up on any of it, let alone draw it, and I remember feeling so frustrated with these - they were alright in and of themselves, but the process felt clumsy and all wrong. 

One thing I did start doing, since I was still not timing each drawing, was attempt the same pose two or three times before moving on. This was actually a very good idea, and I'm glad I tried it. I could take what I did the first time, see where I had the right idea, and where I didn't, and then push and edit and distill it into something that felt much much better. I think this, iteration, is one of the core skills that gesture drawings teach you. It's powerful!

Day six

Still not that many, but the barrier to entry is getting smaller and smaller. I feel weirder if I don't do these than if I do, and that's exactly what I went in wanting to achieve. Anything that I manage to do comes much easier now, although at this point I started to feel myself hesitating again, and not committing to my lines. I was trying to find contours - the outlines of the figure - and anatomy, when the goal is to capture the energy. 

Day seven

The blue were un-timed once again, but then I still didn't like how long I was spending trying to get things "right," so I booted myself back to timed ones. The results were... it's hard! I was so frustrated, haha. After not timing them for most of the week, I guess I really got used to taking my time, to the point where doing these 60 second drawings felt even harder than the 30-second ones in the very beginning. 

I do like these a lot more than the one sin the beginning, though, and that felt really awesome. I was even lucky enough to have done one of the same poses on days one and seven, and...

I think it's a pretty big difference! They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and the one from day one wasn't timed, so it's not quite a fair comparison, but I do feel like day seven's has a lot more contentment and emotion to it. The first one is more anatomically accurate, but that was never the point of these, now was it. 

Day... nine :(

I lost my streak! This really bummed me out, haha. But I didn't want to give up, so I did some more, some un-timed, and some at 60 seconds, just like day seven. I don't remember struggling with these, but I did start to lose sight of some of the things I had learned. I forgot about a line of action, I couldn't feel the energy as well, and I was falling back on old habits of hesitating and being a perfectionist. 

It was at this point that I started to realize just how fleeting being able to find the energy of a pose was. I felt like I understood it for a day or two, but it was just kind of a fluke, and not something I could explain or recreate - I'd get it with one gesture, and miss it with the next - and without tending that fire almost constantly, it died out. It really is like learning another language, it feels like; something you have to become fluent in with practice, otherwise your knowledge decays. Perhaps if I continued to do this for a couple of weeks I would be able to capture it with more deliberately and consistency. 

Over all

This was a very good exercise for me! I learned a lot about myself, I learned so much about what I feel like my art is sometimes missing, and, most importantly, I learned that I can build up good habits when I try. I miss it! For a lot of the week I was doing all of this, I got up early to make sure I had time for my gestures, and that just made so many other things during the day fall into place, not only because I wasn't sleeping in, but because I allowed my first time drawing for the day to be something simple, therapeutic, centering, and something with no pressure; something I just did because I loved drawing and wanted to be better at it, and something to wake me up, preparing me to do it for the rest of the day. I can't explain how valuable that aspect of it was. Forget drawing better, actually, it just made me appreciate drawing more! It made me believe in myself in a way that I haven't in a long time. That's amazing.

I think one of the reasons I always put it off was because I thought I didn't have time. I hear this a lot from other artists, too; we have commissions, or work, or other obligations, and drawing is hard enough as it is. If we're gonna do it, we want to work on those bright and shiny things that we can share with others to get more attention, maybe to feel validated. I don't judge anyone for saying things like that, at all, because we're all different - I don't know everything, and I most certainly don't know much about you. However, looking at just myself, and my own history and actions... I know that I was not being entirely truthful when I said those things. I do have the time, if I reorganize my priorities. More importantly, my art deserves for me to make that time. 

Having done it, now... It's so worth it. 

I sincerely want to get back into this. To keep learning, to keep the good habit going, and to expand on it, doing longer figure drawings, and seeing what else I discover about my work and myself. Even if it's just a few minutes like I said in the beginning of this post, that counts - my art is important to me, and I want to nurture it, because I will only get out what I put in. 

I'll make sure to share to keep sharing this endeavor with all of you, of course ♥

Bonus round!

The blue ones were from imagination, but the rest are from photos. 

If you made it this far, then you're pretty cool! I hope this was interesting :)

As a reward, have these foxes I drew before and after my week of gestures. Learning confidence and how to simplify and design forms, and the huge difference that it made, really surprised me. They're actually what finally made up my mind and got me writing this post, haha.

Thanks everyone ♥