Gesture Drawing: A Quick Way to Improve Drawing Skills
This hub is about a great drawing method for helping beginning art students and artists of all skill levels improve their observational ability and thereby increase their proficiency in drawing. This article is the second in a series about effective drawing instruction techniques. The first, "Blind Contour Drawing: A Great Drawing Instruction Technique and Warm-up Exercise," explained the training technique focusing on training the eye and hand to work more effectively together to ultimately produce more accurate drawings. Gesture drawing has the same goal, but seeks to achieve it in a different way. As you may remember if you read the first hub in this series, blind contour is a technique where the artist creates a drawing without looking at the paper. This introduction of a "handicap" into the drawing process actually increases the artist's abilities. Gesture drawing does much the same thing, but here the "handicap" is an extreme time limit for producing the drawing. This extremely short time for creating the drawing forces the artist to pare down the visual information he or she can produce to the barest minimum.
Some Ground Rules
As the name of this technique implies, the subject matter of these drawings are people and the poses or "gestures" they strike. Of course, drawing people is possibly the most intimidating subject for most artists and art students. However, the artist will overcome his/her fears when using this technique due to the absolute lack of time to worry about their product.
Now, in order to create gesture drawings, some conditions need to be satisfied. First, it is necessary to use a model. This is not a difficult problem. Any willing person can be a model for this technique. A great idea is to find a drawing partner, and the two of you can take turns modeling for one another. In a class situation, one of the students can serve as the model. The poses are not difficult to hold, since the time allowed for the drawing is very short. The poses the model strikes should be "grand" in that the whole body (including arms and legs) is engaged. For this reason athletes and dancers make great models. A person with good body awareness can strike many and varied poses in rapid succession.
Second, a timer of some sort must be used. The essence of the gesture drawing technique is time. Therefore, it must be clear to the artists when the drawing time starts and when it ends. It is helpful to have someone act as leader of the activity, telling the artists when to begin and when to stop drawing. The point of this technique is to make the duration of the drawing time very short - some as short as 5 seconds. This will force the artist to make quick decisions about how to draw the figure. There is no time for fussing with details and "getting the nose just right." All there is time for is quick marks to indicate the position of the head, arms, legs, etc.
As with blind contour drawing, gesture drawing is so demanding and counter to our instinct to slowly and meticulously obsess over every mark we make, that most artists feel liberated from their biggest critic (themselves). With so little time, the artist seems better able to "go with the flow" and create surprisingly good, proportional figures. As with any new skill, some practice is required before the artist will feel comfortable. At first it seems impossible to complete a drawing in so quick a time frame. As one becomes more used to the rapid nature of these drawings, the product created will improve. The drawings will never come to the point where there is great detail, but the the general proportions and completeness of the drawings will get better.
Gesture Drawing with Longer Duration
Tips for Getting the Most out of Gesture Drawing
- Go large — As with the blind contour technique, it is best to draw the figure as large as possible. The artist should try to fill the page with the drawing. In addition to discouraging "tightness," it will help ensure the artist is using his/her arm to execute the drawing rather than just the fingers. This encourages greater speed and fluidity of motion when drawing.
- Use easy materials — Since the artist is drawing fast, it is best to make sure the drawing medium makes good, strong marks on the paper. Soft charcoal or wide-tipped markers are best for this technique.
- Go cheap — This drawing technique is basically for instruction and warm up; therefore it's best not to spend too much on supplies. As with blind contour, some artists find a real affinity for this method and will want to create more lasting works this way. If that is the case, the artist should use better, archival materials.
- Accept the drawings as the stand — Do not be critical of the drawings you or your students produce under this method. Gesture drawing is meant as a learning exercise and a demanding one at that. It is important to not be judgmental about the works created this way. Look at these drawings with an eye toward positives. What are the drawing's strengths? Each drawing represents a learning experience and thus has value.
- Do several drawings — the gesture technique is best done in sets. It's very effective to start with the first timed drawing being very short -— only 5 or 10 seconds. Then make each successive drawing have a slightly longer duration. The artist will have a little more time on these later drawings to better refine the figure and perhaps add some detail. With practice, the artist will become quite comfortable with this process and will be able to create some very admirable drawings.
- Do not extend the time allowed for these drawings too long, however. Any more than 30 to 45 seconds will allow the artist too much time and will encourage "fussing."
More Thirty Second Drawings
Gesture drawing is a great method to help artists of all experience levels gain greater proficiency and confidence. The severe time restriction imposed in this method forces the artist to make quick decisions about the how best to portray the figure. This experience translates to greater ability to render all subject matter. The short time frame allowed for creating the drawing sharpens the artist's perceptive ability and the effectiveness of their attempts to put those perceptions on paper. This is, at its core, what all artists strive to do.