I'm trying to learn human drawing, but really struggling with gesture drawing. I understand why gesture is important, but making a "gesture drawing" is really difficult and frustrating. As a beginner, it feels overwhelming having to think about proportions, movement, perspective, angles, boney landmarks and keeping everything on the page all at the same time.Every single "figure drawing course" insists gesture is the "most important part" about learning to draw the figure, and that you must always practice "gesture drawings". Is this really the most practical approach?
>he fell for it
>>7464424fell for what?All of Vilppu, Huston, Eviston, Hampton, Patrick Jones, Hogarth, Hamm, Loomis, Proko, Bridgman say the same thing.
>>7464423Gesture drawing is basically just dynamic poses. Obviously they are difficult to do when you just started.
>>7464431Well, I'm wondering if it's the first thing I should be learning for drawing the figure.If you're just starting out with mathematics, you don't start with calculus. If you're just starting out with drawing the human body, why should the starting point be applying "flow" and "movement" to the human body? Again, I get that it's important, but if I can't yet draw a human in accurate proportion in a standing straight pose, is applying movement really the right starting point?
>>7464435True, you should start with simple poses and perspective. It depends on what you want to do tho. Just draw whatever you foind interesting. Could just start with using porn as reference. That's always a good start.
>>7464427No they don't, retard. You either don't know what gesture is or haven't actually read those and just parrot retards.
>>7464445Idiot.
Don't think about proportions being right or wrong. Don't measure everything. Just eyeball it.
>>7464479>Don't think about proportions being right or wrongBut it's literally the skeleton drawing for a fully rendered human. If the feet are in the wrong place or the arms are too short, they have to be urgently corrected before proceeding with the drawing.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCQvWBRIBFg
>>7464478Stay a permabeg, see if I care
>>7464489I am simply correctly labeling you an idiot. It's what you are.
>>7464427Hogarth, Hamm and Loomis most definitely do not say that "gesture drawing" is the most important part about learning to draw the figure. In fact, I don't think "gesture drawing" is ever mentioned by any of those authors.
>>7464423maybe you're in my shoes.i tried gesture drawing when i couldn't even copy objects from life. i still have shitty observation skills so starting gesture is useless
>>7464496K, keep struggling because you're misconstruing what you're told, retard
>>7464533I could struggle til the end of my life, and you will still be an idiot.
>>7464427lol wat
How important is it really to learn gesture drawings?I'm not talking about gesture as a concept, but specifically gesture drawings, where you must draw the "direction" and "flow" of the figure and nothing more.I see a lot of experienced artists in videos draw dynamic poses immediately by hand without an underlying gesture drawing. So why do all these courses and books emphasize the importance of le gesture drawing?
>>7465768You rarely need to draw gesture or construct after you have a strong grasp on them. They're like training wheels meant to teach you how to create dynamic poses with a sense of flow
>>7465771Eviston says every single figure drawing he makes starts with a simple underlying gesture drawing.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCQvWBRIBFgSeems to be the same philosophy Vilppu and Huston use as well.
>>7465773Different strokes for different folks. Everybody has a different workflow. Imo those are all more along the lines of academic artists and it's much more common for them to go through the whole process because they focus on methodology, realism and accuracy.
>>7465768if you can then just draw dynamic poses immediately by hand without an underlying whatever. no one stops you
>>7464435yes but they should be simple with almost 0 detail just capture the energy of the post dont detail do 30 of them. dont spend more than a minute. dont even think about it. just move quick and get if over with .
Gesture isn't "more important" than structure.How "important" anything is to learn depends on the artist's skill level and what they specifically need to focus on.Begs who are instructed to jump straight into gesture without learning the basic proportions of the figure fall into all the same pitfalls like drawing too big(clipping out of the canvas) and all the bony landmarks being way out of proportion.
>>7464423>it feels overwhelming having to think about proportions, movement, perspective, angles, boney landmarks and keeping everything on the page all at the same time.and it should be, it's not meant to be approached in that manner. tackle things one topic at a time until they're more or less intuitive, then you don't have to juggle multiple topics at once in your conscious mind because they're relayed to your intuition. spend a few days focusing on just one field, don't go crazy and spend months on just drawing boxes in perspective like some schizos here but have a focused goal in mind when you practicegesture can be seen as the most important part as a successful gesture sets the foundation for a successful figure at the end, it's a butterfly effect since everything builds on what you decided on at the start with the gesture stage>pic relatedi like michael hampton's methodology where he's very formulaic and logical about gesture. this isn't exactly how he does it but here's how i go about it:1. start with the head2. get the sections of the spine (cervical, thoracic, lumbar and sacral)3. develop the masses of the ribcage and pelvis4. draw the limbsnotice the red dotted line, that's the line of balance, keep the masses balanced around that line and pose the limbs in a way that if you balanced them like that in real life it wouldn't topple over. likewise for poses where you want to convey something that's going to happen, you make the masses and limbs imbalanced so that it looks like the figure's about to fall or move in some positionthe proportions are off in the gestures and in my opinion that's fine, you can work to refine from there. like i said in my opinion gestures arent meant to be pretty, i dont think that's the goal with gestures
>>7469576>like i said in my opinion gestures arent meant to be prettyAll of Vilppu, Huston, Eviston, etc would beg to differ. Every single gesture training course has the instructor always trying to emphasize the "beauty" of the gesture/action/curve/etc. It's kind of hard to relate for me.I accept your overall point though. I think it does make a lot of sense to focus on one thing at a time.
>>7469603sure, theyd beg to differ, because chances are theyre teaching life drawing. i cant speak for certain on what those other teachers are teaching, but hampton has the very specific aim of teaching *inventive* figure drawing, aka making up and designing your own poses and figures - aka, drawing from imagination. if that's a goal you have in mind i think you'll find hampton's framework to serve you well
Just read kimon nicolaides book on gesture. Every single person (yes, even Vilppu) uses a remix of Kimon's take on gesture to grift you into permabegdom, eternally dependent on a subscription model to their school. Once you're in, the balls in their court and they can fiddle you around with their made up demands on how to draw.Nicolaides is the natural way the brain works on drawing. >hamptonA hack. Look real closely on the way he lays in the gestural lines. It's a 1 trick pony pattern. >steve h*ustonall bullshit, made up>vilppua watered down version of Kimon's book>every single nigger who shoves gesture in their coursesThey don't know what the fuck it means to gesture. They're just parroting what they heard in rumors and folktales. They're telling you to do exercises they themselves don't do.
>>7470015I did his book. Granted I cheated a bit on the oil paint and watercolor sections by just using brush pens because I'm not buying fucking oil paints and watercolors, but whatever.Anyway I can vouch for it. It's intimidating as hell, he has you do something close to like 4000 gesture drawings over all the schedules, but it teaches you the value of mileage and the observational skills seriously carry over. It's not a magic bullet, it didn't turn me into a pro or anything, but for me it really was like night and day in the amount of practice I can put into one day, and the amount of benefit I get from copying references and doing courses now compared to before I did Nikolaides. It's like lifting weights but for drawing.
please, please help, guys:like op, i’m feeling overwhelmed trying to combine gesture, force, action, and costuming, like the gestural flow of fabric and how it’d actually look if frozen mid-motion with all the different forces acting on each bit of it.>in a very basic sense i understand most of how fabric hangs, pools, gathers, and the basic folds and why they are how they are, but when i try to do dynamic SUPER GESTURAL figures in motion like in action heavy shots with the fabric billowing and flying everywhere, i’m really lacking.Does anyone know the equivalent of the FORCE books or gesture books but focused on fabric/costuming/design/any subjects for gesture that aren’t specifically nude humans/animals?
>>7470031we already helped you, retard >>7470015or you can spin around in circles hoping to find the next big course that'll solve your implanted problem
>>7470031can you pyw? just from what you're describing if you really do understand how fabric works, and you understand gesture in general, that should be enough. but if you are struggling then maybe there's something we're not getting from your post that we could see in your workjust as a very broad shot in the dark, are you keeping the forms of whatever fabric youre trying to draw in alignment with perspective? that could be part of why what youre drawing looks off
>>7465768You can completely live without it and still draw the figure.It's just another tool. Gesture is to constructive figure drawing, what enveloping is to observational drawing.Enveloping is to set the proportions and to give you a manageable starting point to go from big to small without going lost in the details.Gesture is there to do the exact same thing but instead of thinking in terms of 2D shapes you think of something like a vectors in 3D space.This makes it extremely useful for inventing poses. The reason it might be considered the most important part is because just like with envelopes it serves as the foundation for any further step in the process and mistakes here will completely ruin the general proportions of every other part building on it.
>>7470161>>7465768So to clarify you can still draw the figure but you'll have to depend on observational methods.Without any sense for gesture construction a figure in space is gonna be a similar challenge to copying a face by zooming into each facial feature in sequence, or drawing a hand while only looking at each finger individually.
Figure drawing is a very advanced subject that no beginner should start with. I think it's why so many begs quit. Draw abstract shapes and get used to holding a pen first. Learn basic perspective. Draw some boxes. Draw your favourite cartoon character. Some still-lifes. Experiment with different mediums.Along the way you might realize going all-in on figure drawing and studying anatomy isn't what you want.
>>7470179i want to draw story-driven comics. figures are just one small, but critical component of my endgoals.
Define "gesture drawing." Too many people either get bad instructions or misinterpret instructions and think gesture drawing is just "slapdash figure with minimal lines, make sure it's made of long sweeping lines too."
>>7470182You should still start with developing your observational skills first in my opinion.Even if you try to develop your skills of thinking in 3D you ultimately always lay down your drawing as a 2D projection.Without developing your skills to deconstruct shapes and measure them you will basically be blind to your own work and lack the proper skills to translate your mental imagery to the paper accurately.You'll also be able to analyze life a lot better if you learn observation.Gesture drawing can be a fun excursion and might set a seed for later but rushing into it too early is gonna slow you down.
>>7470179You can learn almost everything you need to know about drawing from just figure drawing but you need to accept that you're going to study it every day and suck ass for at least 90 days. And that's not "get good in 90 days," it's "okay, more than half of my figures at least have the right proportions." Might as well go into the thing that interested you rather than durdling drawabox lessons.
>>7470189>misinterpret instructionsyou mean instructions like "just feel the form" and "draw the movement of the figure"?I wonder why beginners have trouble understanding.
>>7470226This is gonna sound rough but that's an IQ problem not an instructional problem. Learning anything is just an exercise in patterning and vocabulary at its core, realistically explaining with practical jargon while coupling a practical demonstration "should" be enough to get a /beg/ started, assuming a 100 IQ but uh, it doesn't seem to be. I won't ding instructors for not being able to speak a completely different language, and I won't ding tards for but picking up what the instructor is putting down, but I WILL ding the tards for not being self aware enough and humble enough to say "okay, this isn't for me, onto the next free instructor." That's why I asked for a definition of gesture drawing, to see what might have been taken away from the instructions they received.
>>7470239That's one way of coping over your lack of intelligence.
>>7470254>You are dumb because you can make sense of instructionsThat's... Interesting? I guess it makes sense for where I imagine you're at mentally, something like "those damn scribbledy scratches ain't never done no how anyone no damn lock of good, nope no sir never catching me a'readin." Or words to that effect. Just copy anime dude, it's more your speed.
>>7470291There is no need to cope, everyone here can infer that you're an insecure moron.
