...the practice of drawing a series of poses taken by a model in a short amount of time, often as an exercise with which to begin a life drawing session. The model may hold a pose for a few seconds or several minutes. More generally, a gesture drawing may be any drawing which emphasizes action or movement.
The point, according to my prof, is to help us, relax and open up our drawing more. He feels (and I agree) that as a class we are too tight, too focused on details. That we are too locked into drawing the outline precisely then immediately filling in detail. So this class was all about gesture drawings.
I had a hard time with this. With understanding what he really wanted from us. We started with 1 minute poses and the classes nearly had a heart attack. We'd barely put pencil to paper when the model moved. So he lengthened the time to 2 minutes. Here are the results:
Compressed charcoal on newsprint
He had us work with the flat side of the charcoal as opposed to the point to help keep the drawings loose and, well, gestural. He then reduced the time back to 1minute:
I got tired of using the flat side of the charcoal so snuck in one using the point:
Next, he had us pick a carrot (yes the vegetable) poured us each a measure of ink and had us continue with 2 min poses using the carrot dipped in ink. Why? I guess to throw us off a bit more, stretch our thinking and eye and technique. It was interesting. Messy but fun:
The final exercise had us sketching as the model moved slowly from pose to pose. This was the hardest bit for me. I struggled to complete several drawings on a page quickly, a full sketch for each pose:
This isn't really what he wanted from us. He explained he was looking more for a Vitruvian Man type of image, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man Oh well, maybe next time.
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