Ryan Woodward Gesture Drawing Download Pdf
Jemima Torguson
While it probably has some merits, but most of the reasoning for it provided by blogs and various teachers is quite silly. All the talk about "capturing the essence of the pose" or "catching the most important part of the drawing" seems just like some kung-fu mysticism or drawing-religion.
But frankly, I don't really have the time for such explicit "warming up" and I'd much rather warm up during actual work - drawing studies, studying anatomy, texture, proper shading and so on. Drawing gets me in the mood for drawing and well, it increases your pencil mileage too. Matt suggests to always do gesture drawings, even if it's the only drawing you do that day, but that would probably make me do gesture drawings ONLY!
So what exactly is so cool about gesture drawings? What do they have that other exercises don't? They're fast and sloppy, and for me they don't seem to bring much to the table if skill improvement is concerned. Am I missing something here?
My introduction to gesture drawing at school was part of a program to develop coordination and speed. I thought my instructors were crazy, but it worked. We spent countless hours on gesture, practiced in conjunction with blind contour drawing - incredibly slow, methodical work. When you think about it, the body mechanics and mental state involved with gesture vs blind contour are at two extreme ends of a spectrum. At one end you're practically moving like the model and at the other end your hand is just an extension of your eye.
Between those two extremes, you'll find the range of normal day-to-day drawing and illustration work that most of us practice professionally. I don't find that the day-to-day work tests the limits of my skills - I find that the real challenge and progress comes from continuing to practice gesture and blind contour. And it shows in my work when I slack off on my practice ;) I hope that helps.
Often one can get so caught up in drawing that you lose expression due to focus. What I see as the primary benefit to gesture drawing is the exercise to free yourself of restraints and learn to be less focused and critical as you draw.
It seems, especially with digital creation, that the tool itself can often force drawing into a very defined, focused, area rather than thinking of the "whole". With gesture drawing you back off and look at the "whole" much more than the minute details. In this way it trains the eye, and hand, to see things differently. And in this respect there's a great deal of value to it.
I don't buy into the perhaps metaphysical aspects which some try to explain. I think it's far more about blurring the vision and seeing form rather than detail. So often I get caught up on detail when the form isn't correct to begin with. Gesture drawings are exercises in form creation, and to this end critical to practice.
I graduated animation and I must say, gesture drawing improved our skills dramatically. I now do gestures everyday. Don't skip on the warm up of gestures. I was drawing stiff and having trouble drawing what I wanted until I started doing gestures, and when I stop doing them, I stiffen up again.
Gestures will make your art come alive, make it more dynamic. Gestures teach you to draw the action, to draw with feeling/emotion and get a story across before you even put on detail. Why skip this crucial step? Your art will be stiff and lifeless. All great artists should be doing it.
Source: 3 years of intensive, 15 hours a day (Monday-Sunday, no breaks) animation college. We did a whole ton of gestures, I hated them, but now I do them everyday even after I've graduated. I do at least one of these videos a day, too: =DDF7IoFlAPA
If you draw without gestures, I promise you will be drawing stiff poses. When we animated, we animated in gestures, and for my main pose I did a gesture, my professor looked at it and said, "Don't lose this gesture. It's extremely important you don't lose your gestures after you put your construction on them." It made the pose flow, made it have feeling. We have to be careful when we put construction on top of them, because the more construction we use, the stiffer they often became.
To me, gesture drawing conveys emotion, lets the character speak without words or fine detail or even color. I think this animation brings those benefits out. I also think it's a great way to come up with more exciting postures for your character.
Humans see gesture first, anatomy second. Gesture trumps anatomy. Think about it, you can tell someone is depressed by the way they walk. You can tell a woman from aan by how they stand, how they gesture. Don't be foolish, gesture is core to drawing convincing, expressive jar characters. Ask Glen Keane.
It's good if you have to do creative works and you have to come up with your own pose - learning to exaggerate gestures is especially good. I feel like it trains you to eyeball better, so you can feel the flow of the movement and can detect flaws without measuring. It also forces you to improve your line quality. It can be hard to draw a long, confident line from the shoulder and still capture the gesture of the model. I believe it's a very good exercise overall.
It improves your visual instincts: by doing gesture drawing, you "grasp" the scene in a way that slow technical drawing often loses. There seems to be an emotional honesty in such drawings. This is not a religious/metaphysical concept, and one that perhaps you'd only understand by doing it on a regular basis for a while. It WILL improve your drawing, whether you believe it or not. Just sayin...
He practices the gestures and when it comes to drawing the actual drawing - the main long pose, he completely does some thing different in his initial strokes. That is why he thinks that the two are not related .
The idea is that a good gesture captures the flow and naturalness of a good interesting pose. A person looking at it should immediately be able to tell what the pose is doing, even though they are a bunch of seemingly "random lines" - than when you draw the main pose you take the same approach initially and THAT IS THE BASE OF YOUR DRAWING. Than you measure (and adjust) and refine all the while not drifting off too much from that original gesture (not easy to do).
Of course this all takes time and it is not an over night thing. Getting in a good gesture....adjusting and adding details without compromising too much on the original gesture....all this takes time.
Look at a very good gesture drawing....the best you made or have seen. Now imagine that all the details are on it ....would it not look better than if that initial gesture was not there to add details to !
Having good gesture drawing skills is also essential for 3d animators, as when it is all completely rendered and shown on the cinema screen you still are left with a 2D image (unless you are watching in 3d).
Carefully observe the pose, but then think of what the motion of the action is and the emotion of the character. Then think how can the limitations of life be enhanced in my pose to better reflect and describe what I want to show the audience.
I realized while practicing gesture drawing that usually the model got stuck in my head.
So I figured, drawing poses using photos of interesting models and characters will be much more stimulating
Grab something to draw! Select the type of poses you want to draw and your desired time limit.
Try to draw the essence of the pose within the time limit. The image will change after the time limit has passed.
Gesture Drawing, some times called scribble studies, is work defined by rapid execution. Typically between 30 seconds to two minutes. A gesture drawing may be any drawing which attempts to capture action or movement. (wikipedia)
This kind of very rapid drawing of the figure builds (through the act of frequent repetition) an instinctive understanding of human proportions which may aid the artist when executing more extended works.
Drawings longer than two minutes are usually not considered gestures, as they inevitability allow the artist more time to measure and plan the drawing, or to begin to define the form with modelling. Once the artist begins measuring, erasing, shading or otherwise improving the drawing with a second pass, they have ceased to gesture draw and begun rendering. They will be improving the complexity of their current drawing, but they are no longer practising their ability to draw correctly from an instant impression.
A gesture drawing can be as simple as a wire frame to work out the position of the body elements as they move. As you will see from the collection assembled in this post these quick expressive drawings can be beautiful works of art in there own right, full of energy and movement.
Both Robert Palevitz (above) and Derek Overfield (bellow) use a combination of line and tone in a way I really admire. Both men work with pastels to create unique gesture drawings. Robert Palevitz is a still life artist predominately. These drawings are made at life class that he attends regularly. Derek Overfeild uses the male figure in many expressive ways using different mediums.
Tone is seemingly quickly captured showing a strong sense of dark masses and light masses in two strong tones. Then a confident contour depicts the outer shape of the form. There is a clear distinction between the form mass and the out line that is very effective as a gesture statement.
It is a simple but beautifully done dance sequence, with suggestions of a story, but open ended enough for viewers to make their own interpretations. Elegantly animated, the sequence is set to World Spins Madly On by The Weepies.
What I find particularly enjoyable is the way the characters are drawn as gestural figures, as though from quick life studies, or the kind of construction line drawings used by those who must invent the figure from imagination, like storyboard artists, illustrators and comics artists.
In addition to his own site, which includes examples of his illustrations, storyboards and animatics, as well as other short films, Woodward has created a site for Thought of You and similar experiments called Cont Animated, referring in part to his years of teaching gesture drawing, a history that informs every frame of Thought of You.
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