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Expanded Gesture Drawing
Expanded Gesture Drawing
Areas of focus: Line quality and weight, surface manipulation, mark-making
Areas of focus: Line quality and weight, surface manipulation, mark-making
Goal: On non-traditional surface, use a series of gesture drawings develop a subject accurately and quickly while showing movement and creativity in execution and approach. Vary your mark making style for added areas of interest.
Practice Process:
Think of a gesture drawing as a quick drawing that captures body language, emotion, and movement of a subject. This can be a full body gesture or a portrait gesture, but they function in the same way. The movement and line quality create life in a drawing.
Gesture drawings take practice and will improve the more you do them! This week you will complete lots of sketches in your sketchbook! In a college figure drawing class, for example, posed drawing sessions are timed ranging from 1, 5, 10, 15, and 30 min in length. Typically the class starts with shorter time periods and works up to longer time frames within one class period. The longer the pose, the more detailed the drawing are expected to become. The idea is that gesture drawings should become the "skeletons" that help develop accurate proportions underneath your more detailed final drawings.
1. Read the Basic Gesture Drawing Hints.
2. Watch the Gesture Drawing Video.
2. Practice practice practice! You need to create a minimum of 25 gestured drawings before moving on.
- Keep these practice sketches between 1 can range from 1 minute to 10 minutes in length.
- Label each drawing with the length of time in the corner of each.
- You are allowed to draw your classmates (don't tell them you are sketching them, just do it!).
- A great resource for figure drawings are stock photos. Google search "stock photo" and "athlete" "dancer" or "portrait" for several great images. Caution, these are practice, do not spend all your time looking for the perfect picture. Your drawings shouldn't be detailed enough to worry about what sport they play.
4. See below for directions for your final piece of artwork.
Basic Gesture Drawing Hints:
- Gesture drawing does NOT equal stick figure, but it can start with a basic line structure.
- Always look for the longest axis or action line first! This can be from head to toe if the figure is just standing or from finger tip to pointed toe if the figure is completing an action.
- Move throughout your figure, look for major lines or shapes and work down to minor or lines shapes. Think large areas first, medium information second, and small areas or details last
- This isn't about details! Get the shape and proportion right. Details won't matter if the size is wrong!
- You must work focused and fast to gather as much information as possible!
- Don't take the time to erase any wrong lines, just add in the correct information as you see it!
- It might help you to start with five minutes and work down to two or three minutes.
Final Project Process:
Think back to the idea that gesture drawings capture motion and the emotion in a portrait or figure. Successful gesture drawings will have movement created by both the line making of the artist, and also the movement within the subject matter. No, I don't mean the subject has to be physically moving, but that within the composition, there is visual movement for the artist to pull from - AKA "good lines". At this point, look through your personal photo bank for an image of a figure or portrait that contains that visual movement. If you do not have one, take one ASAP! Think about composition and framing. Remember your work must be a minimum is 8"x 10" and a maximum is 18"x 24".
*Hint*
We as humans are drawn to our own human condition, we relate to it. How can you portray a small piece of our common humanity or a connection we share through this piece? How can you portray something beautiful or ugly about humanity that pulls at our emotions? Maybe it is a connection through a culture or an age group? You can see examples of this in the examples slides above. For the animal gestures below, you can feel the characteristics and qualities of the animals without them becoming cartoonish. Doing one of these things is what will transform your drawing from looking like an exercise and looking like a piece of fine art.
Looking at the example slides for figures, portraits, and animals (below). You can see how artists have pushed basic gesture drawing into more refined pieces of art while maintaining the gestural qualities they began with. There are many "right" ways to approach this idea. You can use color within your lines or within the negative space. You can overlap gesture drawings to create depth. You can use graphite, ink, oil pastel, watercolor, or acrylic paint to enhance and emphasize your figure. A simple way to set these drawings apart is to create them on a colored ground. This allows you to work in both light and dark values of your media choice.
Select your image: Select and print your reference photo(s) you will be working from. Attach them into your sketchbook.
Create your Canvas: Find your non-traditional surface to work on. It can be a big sheet of cardboard, book pages, newspapers, an old map, takeout menus or all the above collaged together. Working on non-traditional surfaces is important to your portfolio. Be brave and creative in this challenge.
Practice sketches: Create several short gesture sketches in your sketchbook of this photo to familiarize yourself with its shapes and lines. Try to approach it differently each time. Place each of these in your sketchbook and label them as before.
Practice media technique: Complete any media exploration you may need to do. If you are using a color ground, test your drawing/painting medias on a small piece of this to ensure they will work together well. If you are layering paints/medias, make sure they will work well together. Identify you color pallet you will be using.
Final Piece: Create your large scale gesture drawing with an additional artistic investigation. This should start to take on a more refined feeling while maintaining some of the gestural qualities of the initial drawing. Do not get rid of all your original mark making, continue to refine again and again over the top of it to create layers within your work.
Option B: Animal Gesture Drawing
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