Hi everyone,

I wanted to share some of my gesture drawings which were done as a demonstration for a tutorial. I hope you enjoy them 🙂 .

More can be seen here http://www.swendly.com/tutorials.html

Some drawings from my daily sessions. For more you can visit: http://www.swendly.com/tutorials.html

Here are some more gesture drawings that I did this past week. I really enjoyed analysing these archery poses, especially the ones that I commented on. The notes are just a few of the thoughts that cross my head when I’m analysing the poses. Each pose is a whole story on itself. Observing and capturing the main events of a pose, those subtleties that make a pose interesting, is what excites me to do gesture drawings. Each drawing becomes an experience, like a roller coaster ride, leaving me in want for more once the ride ends.

To me, the goal of gesture drawing is to analyze, experience and capture the action that the figure (or any living being) is performing.

In many cases I’ve seen the goal of gesture drawing being reduced to drawing a pose fast. While practicing to capture an action in a short period of time (30 seconds, 1 minute etc.) surely has its benefits, consider that gesture drawing is defined by the intent of the drawing, not by how fast the drawing is done. I’ve encountered many artists who thought that if they were not able to nail a pose in 30 seconds, they were not good enough. In turn, this mindset also transferred to their imagination drawings, resulting and frustration. In doing character design, I invest a lot of time and thought into a character's pose. Sometimes up to an hour. The pose needs to convey character. If it doesn't, it doesn't matter how fast you drew it.

Gesture drawing should be about experiencing and understanding how the body is functioning to perform a particular action. And this simply takes time. Especially when dealing with complex poses or multiple figures, I’ve found that just spending 30 seconds or 1 minute on the drawing does not allow me to extract enough information to apply to my drawings from imagination. So my advice is to balance your gesture drawing exercises with both short (30 seconds, 1-3minutes) and long (5-10min) time intervals. The shorter time intervals should help you to see and capture the big picture while the longer intervals allow you to focus more on the nuances of an action. Again, keep in mind that the goal should be to analyze, experience and understand what is happening with the figure, not trying to copy it as fast as you can. Imbuing this experience and understanding into your own drawings is what will make them truly come alive instead of being just a bunch of lines on a surface.