Learning to capture Gesture in your drawings

So I’m assuming you have read my “learning to learn how to draw” article, if not I suggest you jump on to that first because it basically gives you more of the basics of learning to draw. This article will hopefully give you an idea of how to practise gesture drawing, where to start and where you want get to.

There are more than a few different translations for gesture drawing but basically you want to as quickly as possible get an accurate little drawing that tells the story that you need it to, I am mostly going to focus on drawing people, because when you draw people your entire drawing ability increases substantially. So the story of something is basically what the subject doing, feeling or expressing. There are a lot of people around the world and although we don’t all speak the same language body language is almost entirely universal. You want to be able to express whatever you want in your drawings and tell your subjects story as accurately as possible.

So different types of gesture drawings, there are 3 that I have come across and I have played with them all and are all excellent practise for any aspiring artist (that’s you =)). The first one I recommend you should play with is Walt Stanchfields and can be found in his book “Gesture Drawing for Animation”. Definitely print it out and make it your bedside buddy. This will get you off to a good start with gesture drawing and you should practise everyday. When you watch TV sketch a bit, if you are on your brake at work and have spare time sketch a bit.

Try to capture the gesture of your drawings, only spend about a min on each, try action poses, sitting poses standing, climbing, biking, jumping.etc if you work or live in the city, it is a great place to find a lot of people just doing things. Just draw them, when you are on the bus just draw the people. I drew when I was riding the bus for about 2 hours a day for six months and when I got home I drew a little from TV. When I got to my course before it started I would draw, rawing is the secret to learning how to draw =)

They will look really odd at first and you won’t have any sense of proportion but that’s fine just keep at it and keep reading “Gesture Drawing for Animation” by Walt Stanchfield, its free to download, and cost you barley anything to print and is priceless.

This is the very first page from my very first sketch book, I have drawn before but this was my first sketchbook experience and my first attempt at drawing things =).

As you can see the proportions are wrong, the story isn’t getting told correctly, there is no sense of weight, the figure is oddly shaped, there are more than a dozen things wrong with these pictures but that alright I learnt a lot from them, and your sketch book isn’t a book of pretty pictures, it’s a book full of drawing experiences you’ve had and learnt from.

A basic gesture drawing, a 1 2 or at max 3 min drawing of your subject trying to capture their “essence”, the truth as Walt Stanchfield would put it =)

This here is what you want to be aiming for, remember before you draw anything you will always draw a quick gesture drawing.

Links worth visiting
MUST GET
Pdf of “Gesture Drawing for Animation” by Walt Stanchfield (Defnitly print this)

Glenn vilppu has a course that teaches a very good way of capturing the "flow", bit costly tho.
Sheldons Art Academy on youtube uses Glenn Vilppu's techniques if you want to have a looksee.

Another gesture tutorial from Nancy doyle Fine Art who uses “The natural way to draw” by Kimon Nicolaides as a refrancnce, which i will cover in another article on another day.

Enjoy and have fun

Learning to capture Gesture in your drawings by Willem Wynand Van Aswegen