Draw over for Karl Essex

Once you have a strong understanding of form and shape design as Karl does, then you can focus on gesture. Gesture is just the flow of things. All the little pieces and details. things like buttons on a shirt or wrinkles all add to the overall flow and gesture. Make sure your details aren't randomly shooting gestures off to other places.

More on shapes

Sometimes I like to forget about gesture and form and go right in for the shapes. This won't work if you don't have a strong understanding of form and gesture and it can sort of become a cheat for actually knowing how to draw. I fell into this trap for a while. Basically, you won't be able to move the character around. You just learn shapes that work for certain poses and angles. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can't really design nice shapes if you only think about gesture and form. I sometimes take my sketchbook and sketch people at a coffee shop, or from the car at a red light. This is my approach. It's very fast and you can learn to get nice natural poses instead of those "posed" life drawing poses.

Gesture drawing demo

Here are two demos for my Figure invention class. For three of the weeks, I bring in a costumed model for gesture drawing. I try to get people to add a background and some sort of story. I feel like if you get in the habit of doing that, it elevates your drawings to something more. even if you are doing just character design or just doodling.

gesture

A lot of people have a lot of different ideas when it comes to gesture. I'm not going to be arrogant and say this is the best approach. the truth is, you should just take the approach that is the most enjoyable to you. For me, I like to find a nice simple shape that all the lumps sit on and flow into.

Ref from: http://characterdesigns.com/

More on Gesture

I've never found this in a book, so let me know if you see it. I sort of pieced it together from some Steve Huston notes I found and from different life drawing classes.














Looking back at this old image, we can see how this simple shape is the gesture

What you see vs what you know

I've been posting a lot of quick sketches and gesture drawings. I've been going out on Saturdays if anyone is in the LA area and wants to join, hit me up on facebook. I usually post where we go. anyways, there is a difference between copying what you see, like in a long pose, and modifying a memorized version of things in a quicksketch. the best way to explain it would be in facial features. I have a set of memorized eyes, noses, ears, etc. I don't copy the person in front of me, but say they have a large or small nose, I draw my memorized nose small or big. I also try to push any ideas I might see further. The reason I do this is, sometimes the person is riding by on a bike, or moving and you want to catch a quick pose, so it's good to not be looking at them for the stuff, but just the pose. Then you can glance once, get the gesture and then just sit and draw your drawing

how I start a drawing

So, some times I put down the gesture, and sometimes I put down the redirected gesture (due to a form). This is sort of an artistic choice. The nice thing about it is that you can get nice big shapes right away.

Tool kit

So, how do you start. You can use anything in your toolkit. Different artist lean on different tools more heavily. Just see what you like. I like to start with shape rhythm or gesture depending on the pose.

Legs

Here is a tid bit of the leg stuff we went over in class. If you simplify most legs, they are just a tapering tube with a little gesture. Then you can add all the surface details to make them look like different styles.

drawing tips

I want to try and do something. The best way I've found to learn is to try something and then show it to a teacher. Usually the teacher will draw on top and show me how to do things differently. So, if anyone wants to send in a drawing, I can show you guys how to look at your drawing and apply gesture form overlap and design principles to your drawing. I'll post the examples on the blog here. So, send in some stuff.

Rad

Different approaches

So, Marco asked how to start a drawing. There are as many different ways to draw as there are people. Some people start with the nose and then draw the eye and work their way out drawing every piece with perfectly clean lines. Some people draw with only perfectly ruler straight lines. Some people draw with little tick marks all over. Some people draw with wild scribbles. I draw with flowy lines and big shapes. The important part for me was first learning the pieces. the hand, foot, eye, mouth, ribcage, etc. then, I'm not trying to figure that part out when I'm drawing. Once you have the parts, you can focus on the whole. I can't really do both at once. So at first just draw slow and figure out the parts. Then you can draw in whatever style you want. There are also a million different ways to think about the parts. That's why I study. I find as many ways to draw a head, or a hand, or a ribcage, and I combine all the ideas until it makes sense for me. I try to make everything as simple for myself as possible, so I can worry about the pose, gesture and shape and something I haven’t talked at all about, the emotion.

How to construct the figure

Here is the approach I use to construct the figure. For this demo I left out the "gesture" stage. In step 2, you just have to make sure your overlaps of the contour reinforce the direction of the form.

Draw over for Jim Mortensen

So, Jim sent in the first one. He did some really nice designs here. I'll just take one and show the principle. Just go through your drawing and check every line and shape. Then, I would try posing the characters out to get into gesture and story.

Gesture

So I'm going to go through my thoughts on "what is drawing?" and elaborate on each part. In the future, I'll be doing story boarding tutorials on the art center blog and drawing tutorials here.