Gesture Drawings



Graphite on paper. Various sizes. 2002.
Nudes are one-minute gesture drawings, clothed are five-minute.
By the third semester of drawing, each class was opened with about twenty gesture drawings of some sort. Nude drawings were when we were lucky enough to have an actual model. Gesture drawing from nude models was one of the most valuable lessons I had in my early art career. The ability to capture the essential human form in just a few well-placed lines was a more difficult task than I ever imagined, but one that's well worth pursuing for any artist.
Being able to portray the shifting of weight and balance of a figure is just as important as proportion, and there's no faster way to learn it than gesture drawing till you're sick of it. Young artists often trap themselves by making "tight" drawings: using mechanical or very sharp pencils and focusing only on extremely realistic details. They will often be hunched over a flat desk and drawing very small, erasing and redrawing the same area many times. These characteristics of tight drawers are all not only counterproductive but downright destructive to growth of an artist. Timed gesture drawing is one of the most effective exercises for breaking artists of these bad habits. I've personally observed many mediocre-at-best tight drawers become incredible drawers through repeated "loosening up" exercises, mainly gestures.
You don't necessarily need models to break out of bad drawing habits though. Anyone at home can try it with landscapes or still-lifes too as a start. The key ingredients are getting your work space at a vertical angle (not flat at least), using charcoal or soft dull pencils, using your entire arm to draw without resting your hand on the paper, and working very quickly. The idea is that you have to master the overall form before you move on to details. This is the biggest mistake I see in almost every aspiring artist's work. The details are realistic, but the overall figure/composition is stiff and unconvincing because they most likely have skipped that part of the learning process.
It will be frustrating at first...but for artists who really want to improve, you have to get out of your comfort zone and push yourself to try new techniques. You absolutely will become a better artist as a result.