How to make quick sketches from real life models?
The less time you have to draw something, the less detail you can put down.
So, instead you want to put down as much information about the pose as you can with as few lines as possible!
This is called finding the gesture - the essence of the pose. Forget about form, forget about contour, gesture is about the feeling and the motion!
It’s the first stage to any drawing, it helps to have a general idea of what you want to draw down on the page before you jump into the details.
When working from life, the image of what you want to draw is already in front of you. So before you draw anything, take some time to look at what you are going to draw.
Look for the motion, the lines that travel through the body.
Once you’ve found the motion, you can then draw it.
This is the gesture - it does not yet look like a person because there is no form or contour, but it should still give you a sense of the pose and its motion!
You can then build the forms on top of the gesture.
It’s essentially like drawing stick-men, as you’re drawing lines rather than contours.
Those are gestures I spent a couple minutes on to make them look nicer lmao, but this stage is really quick - this one took about thirty seconds
Also a lil tip: When drawing the gesture, you want to use long continuous strokes.
You’re trying to convey as much as you can in one line, because you’re only spending a couple seconds on it! The more you can draw with one stroke, the quicker it’ll be done.
In a life drawing session, you’ll generally be given a minute to two minutes to spend drawing before the model changes pose.
Most of this time you should spend looking for that motion rather than drawing. If you have a minute to draw the pose, spend thirty seconds studying the model!
If you jump right into the drawing, you’ll actually take longer because you don’t know what you’re drawing.
You can practice this at home using pixelovely’s figure drawing tool - set the timer to 1 minute, and try finding the gesture.
If you struggle to finish the pose before the image changes, set it to 2 minutes and spend more time looking at the photo!
If you find it hard to actually find the motion and the gesture in the pose, I recommend practicing on cats instead.
Cats are a lot simpler than humans, and as they’re so flexible the motion is more obvious. They’re a good way to start if you’re having trouble.
And lastly, Proko has a few good videos on gesture and quick poses!
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