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(Please read part 1 of my post of Gesture Drawing HERE)

I was hanging out with a friend a few months ago during a sketch group.  My friend asked me to draw a certain pose.  I looked at the blank page and started to put together, in my mind, how the pose would go.  What foot is the weight on?  Where is the elbow is relation to the rib cage?  How many heads tall should I make this figure?  Structure?  Angles?  Depth? Lighting?  OK, you’ve got the chest connected to the arm this way, connected to the neck at this angle, etc., etc., etc.

After a couple of minutes my friend asks what was wrong and why I was taking so long.  I know you can draw, he said, and you should be able to knock this single pose out in seconds.  You’ve drawn it dozens of times.  I was a little taken aback.  I’m not the fastest artist I countered.  I told him about my thought process.  He picks up the pad and draws the sketch quickly, going boom, boom, boom.  There.  Done.

At the time I just thought my brain didn’t work like his.  He was self taught.  I was more classically trained.  I had a process.  He just drew.

I now understand and realize that you don’t drive a car by thinking about the individual parts.  Micheal Jordon does think cross-over, spin, put the ball in my right hand, then my left, and stick out my tongue before he dunks a basketball.  It’s a gestalt thing.  A left brain holistic thinking thing that my natural logical right brain tendencies try to overrule.  It’s hard to remember all the details of a person’s pose to draw but it’s very easy to remember the gesture of the person’s pose.

The really, really cool thing too is the gesture is what our brain recognizes most as the pose.  Like my earlier example from part 1 of this post on Gesture the image in your head of a man with his foot on the chair got much clearer and sharper in your mind when I added the context of him being sad.  It’s the same way you can remember hundreds of different faces of people you’ve meet.  When you see a person you recognize you don’t see the nose, add the eyes, the ears, the width and height of the face and then know who the person is.  You see the gesture.

So, do some gesture drawing every day to warm yourself up and after a while that looseness and life will begin to seep into your regular work.  Drawing will become easier and a lot more fun!