Davis Goodman

STATEMENT

I've been drawing for many years, and I've come a very long way from where I started, but gesture and pose studies were something that had always felt intimidating to me - So I would always avoid doing them and instead focus on making my artwork look "good". The end result of this process was allowing me to create unique and stylish illustrations that were very polished, but it was impossible for me to ignore the fact that my fundamentals were lacking. I had never had the chance to take an art class throughout the various schools I'd attended, so I majored in art at UCSC so I would have an environment to learn these things that I had skimmed over in a traditional and controlled setting. This class gave me an excellent opportunity to learn how to create gesture drawings and use them as the basis for a full illustration. Learning the techniques used to create convincing poses was an extremely rewarding process, and allowed me to grow noticeably from every assignment.

BEFORE

Starting out, I had a vague idea of the techniques used in creating gesture sketches. However, without the experience of ever having practiced drawing them, I lacked the muscle memory and artistic sense of what made them work. The result were approximations of the styles I had seen others use, but things like deliberate emphasis of specific forms and the flow of the pose were still visibly lacking.

AFTER

Through the use of various practices, such as timed gesture sketches and drawing imagined poses, I built my visual library and grew a sensibility of what shapes to emphasize in order to efficiently create a given pose and strengthen its believability. Gesture drawings are not detailed drawings that show the volume of every form, but the fundamentals that give life to any representationalist illustration.

MOTION DRAWING

I've created many drawings with poses based in motion, and have created hand-drawn animations in the past, but the concept of imagining a pose within a hypothetical animated "scene" was something I had never considered before. By creating a pose with the context of its starting point, I learned how to consider the mechanics of poses and give them more physicality.

COLLABORATIVE DRAWING

Creating artwork using nothing but premade assets created by my classmates was an interesting challenge that was different from anything I've done in my own personal work. Having to take numerous wholly unrelated drawings and combine them into a thematically consistent scene was a great exercise in working under restraints. The end result was a scene showing the orbs in the background illustration as the object of the characters' fixations, with a lone woman looking elsewhere. By using the orbs as a grounding point, I was able to recontextualize each of the poses and give them a new narrative.

CONTACT: dalgoodm@ucsc.edu | PORTFOLIO

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