2 minute gestures...and sort of..a "how to"

So below is a 2 minute gesture drawn in Photoshop based on photo ref from pixelovely.

It's easily my favorite drawing this evening and only really happened towards the end of the session. One of the main reasons I keep a blog for my figure drawing is to reflect back on my drawings. I think it's very important to look at your work and pick out what you like and dislike, and find ways to keep drawing exciting for yourself.

So anyway let's turn back the clock a little bit, I started off with 1 minute poses. As you can see I started using tone, defining muscles...a little too much to squeeze into 1 minute. I could just force myself to simplify my drawings, but when you're eager to draw a certain way I think you should just go for it. So I decided to switch it up to 2 minutes after these.

2 fundamental mistakes I ...pretty much always make...came up in the 1 minute ones:

1)- I draw too large...and force the figure into frame or start scrolling up and down in Photoshop to move up and down the figure. This obviously is not a very good idea, because you either don't draw feet for example because they are off frame. Or..in some cases you're drawing blind just looking at the legs without seeing the relation to the rest of the body.

solution: Very easy, just draw a very quick gesture (30 sec) that encases the entire figure. If it's too big you can change it on the fly...that initial gesture should be drawn light or with a light color pencil if you are working traditionally.

2) Getting stuck into detail WAY too early. See the notes on the image below.

Anyway, moving on I went for 2 minute poses working on 2 layers. On the first layer I draw a very quick gesture with a big brush on low opacity. I then switch to the next layer and refine the gesture with a thinner brush...it's important to note though that I don't zoom in. Keep the entire figure on screen, or if you are drawing on paper..draw small!

I put the 2 together below so you can see the quick 30-45 second gesture with the refined drawing next to it. Keep in mind this is all done in 2 minutes..which..if you're not used to it, is not much time! If you are new to this, I suggest first practicing to draw those loose gestures first before you can go in with the second phase.

These were all fairly stiff though, it wasn;t until drawing 3 on the page below that I started to get into some flow... I guess we're officially warmed up and ready to dig into some creative work!

Dr Sketchy's Little Red Riding Hood Dublin

So this is my second time to Dr. Sketchy's and I feel I had a pretty good session. This is definitely the place to bring in some color pencils and go to town when there are longer poses.


Started off with some 1 minutes:

Not so much a fan of the ones below

2 minute pose:

The 3 pages below are all a bit messy, if I was being selective with what I post I would've definitely left those out.

10 minute pose below, I'm really happy with how I used the media here. It's not something I usually draw, but I can't say I don't like it.

The last one was a 40 minute pose, I worked 30 minutes on this drawing on an A4 pad. Really loved what I was starting to accomplish with the mixing of 3 colored pencils. Soft orange (bad quality color pencil), saturated orange (color pencil that left a lot of lead on the page) and another brownish watercolor pencil. I really just happened to have those with me, and it kinda worked for the shading on those legs for example.

I just wish I stepped back to see the body proportions were a bit all over the place. but it was fun to draw and that's all that matters!

Lunch Sketches @ Foodhall

Some quick heads using a brown color pencil..had to push the contrast quite a bit for the lines to pick up on the scans.

30 sec and 2 min gestures

I don't like the 2 min gestures below, it was at the very end of the evening and I was just doing them to be able to say I did some studies...never do that! I think for studies to be successful you need to have a fresh mind, at least be in the moment to get something out of it. Otherwise you might as well just draw some circles or better yet read a book.

Sketchbook Long Studies

Started the day with a couple of 30 second gestures using posemaniacs (done in Photoshop)

I then moved on to my sketchbook for some longer un-timed drawings from Photo Reference. It's actually from a book called Virtual Pose 3 (Got it on sale in Chapters). It's really cool because you can turn the model around to find an angle you like.

As you can see I started shading differently on the legs, which I find much clearer for study purposes.

On a side note I start with a quick 1 minute gesture with blue pencil, before I go in with a mechanical Pencil (0.5).

You can really see the importance of that initial sketch in the drawing below. I really screwed up the gesture but was too lazy to fix it ....building on top of a bad foundation is always a bad idea...but the main idea behind these studies is not gesture, it's really about investigating anatomy..especially interested in that midsection at the moment.

Life Drawing: Sol Art Gallery Long Pose

Below on the left a couple of heads I sketches during lunch at the Foodhall in Dublin. And on the right the first couple of 1 min poses from the warm up before the long pose. Those couple of sketches are pretty important to get the eye/hand coordination going :P

Here a couple of 1 mins I liked for different reasons.

Since I've been sculpting out that mid section a lot in slower studies, I managed to get it down very quickly here in the image below. Proof that doing the same thing over and over eventually becomes second nature.

In the one below I especially like simple curved stroke for the leg coming in on top, also like the curve of the shoulder.

Legs in the next one aren't very successful, but I like the upper body and curve in the lower arm.

So next up is one pose, broken up in 3 sessions of 30 minutes. I changed sides for each of the time slots. For each of the drawings I started with a gestural sketch in cheap crayon pencils and then went in with my new friend, a 0.5 mechanical pencil.

In the one below I really don't like the way the head connects to the body, I also made the mistake of drawing a hair going down from the ear...it looks like the edge of the jaw, but it isn't.

Some nice things in the drawing below. Especially like the hair and the hand.

For the last one I really liked the initial pencil sketch, I tried to keep the drawing lively but I still feel that initial sketch was a lot more pleasing to look at it..unfortunately nobody will ever know :D

Would've liked another 15 minutes on this one, but unfortunately time ran out.

Some Loomis Wise words

I actually starting "reading" the text accompanying the drawings I had been copying from Loomis. Gotta say it's well worth your time, plenty of additional insight and lots of encouraging words actually!

SKILL IS THE ABILITY TO OVERCOME OBSTACLES! - Loomis

I think we keep forgetting how hard it is to learn anything new. You can't put a gold medal sprint athlete on a soccer field and expect him to score goals for your team. He'd have to learn how to handle the ball, get a feeling for where the goal is, etc (I'm hardly an expert :P).

Point is that when you want to learn something new, it's going to take practice and you'll need to cover the basics regardless of how good you might be at drawing. You also need to prepare to fail. This is also the purpose of this blog, to share what I study, where I fail and what I do to get better I guess.

Anyway enough blabber, here are some images from the last 2 days:


Some horrible Loomis heads, re drawing them to try and memorise and also understand his structure and proportions. I might actually try and draw these slower and bigger, because as you can see it goes a bit all over the place. Part of that is when I get sleepy, I also get incredibly lazy with my marks and accuracy. But I'm kinda happy I still fill up at least a page every day.

Below some head structure based on images, trying to understand the perspective and how I could draw Loomis' structure as a base for let's say a longer render.

And today again covering sleepy time with some Loomis head studies:

Followed by 2 slow figures. I don't measure out the body...instead I draw a "gesture" in blue and then draw a more refined version of the figure on top of the blue. As a result proportions are off, but I also think it prevents the study from looking too stiff.