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I ran across a few more drawings from my regular figure drawing sessions.  Click to enlarge.

I hope you like them.

I discovered a new figure drawing class locally and went to their first session Tuesday night.  It’s called Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School.  It’s figure drawing meets burlesque.  Tuesday night’s theme was Mardi Gras so there were a lot of beads.  Very well done and a ton of fun.  Another cool aspect of the class is that numerous times throughout the class they will have a contest.  For instance, at one point everyone had to draw from a 5 minute pose using their non-dominant hand.  Afterward everyone judges who they liked the best.  The winner might receive a bottle of wine or a gift certificate to a local restaurant.

They hold the class once a month and I can’t wait to go back again.  Here are a few of the drawings I did.

(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!

Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.  After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.

- Bruce Lee

Throughout my entire life as an artist I’ve always had a consistent problem with being too stiff, of staying loose and keeping my drawings loose.  I’ve discovered a number of methods and tools over the years to help with this but it’s only been recently that I’ve rediscovered something that helps dramatically.

Gesture drawing!

Most artists have fond (yes, this is sarcasm) memories of beginning figure drawing classes doing these scribble like drawings.   A gesture drawing is where an artist attempts to capture the “gesture” or “essence” of a pose or subject.  It’s usually done it very small window of time such as 10 seconds to 60 seconds.  The object isn’t to draw the actual pose but to get down that thing that represents the rhythm of the pose.  In the book, “The Natural Way to Draw“, artist and teacher, Kimon Nicolaides describes it like this.  I’m paraphrasing here.

Imagine that I describe to you a pose to draw of a man facing a chair with one foot on the chair.  He is leaning forward and his arm is resting on his knee.  His hand supports his head.  You could draw that fairly well.  But what changes if I add to the description that the man is sad.  Suddenly the pose is much more alive and defined in your mind.  This is where the gesture comes from.

In good drawing and painting most see composition or design as the key thing that makes or breaks a piece.  I’d put gesture right up there because this is the thing that conveys the “genesis” of what the viewer is relating to.  It’s what makes a drawing look alive.  It’s what causes a line to be a LINE and then just a line again.

(More to come in part 2)