How to do Gesture Drawing

How to do Gesture Drawing How to do Gesture Drawing The gesture drawing is a way of drawing your subject which is a human figure and who is sitting in front of you and giving a pose for you to draw. You can also draw stationary objects but it should always be something you are looking at and then drawing. You need to capture the models’ looks and ideas that come to you looking at the subject. You can do gesture drawing by following some simple rules –

You have to look at the subject and get the essence or the feel of the way the subject looks. Observe the subject and keep drawing the subject. You need to glance at the paper less but at the subject more to capture the pose and the gesture of the subject as you interpret them.
You need to find the line of the body of the subject. You might find the subject simple or complicated to draw but you can represent the whole subject with a single line and then expand the line to get the whole body. For a human being you can get the axis of the body and reflect the posture and even the motion. You may find that one line is difficult to capture the subject with and you go to draw two lines and get the whole posture of the subject.
When you are drawing a human being as your subject, you can find the most active place of the body and depict the part with contour lines. You can draw the torso, limbs and head with these contour lines. You are just trying to find the essence of the body – you may not find time to complete each part and so this is a better option.
You can use shading and circular lines to depict mass. It is not very distinct and exact but just an idea where you have the mass. This should not make your drawing a group of circular lines but you need to depict the place that has more mass with these circular lines.
You must keep on moving your hand without looking at the drawing. You need to find the flow of the subject and for that you need to keep moving your hand and capturing the subject. If you stop and look at the drawing – you loose the connectivity and start thinking…which not a part of this drawing.
You must limit the time you are taking to draw each part. You must not take too long a time to draw each part then it would take off quality time from the other parts. You will also not highlight the other parts as you do the single part that you are taking time with. Draw which part your eyes fall on but don’t try to maintain a logical order.
The model has to shift position every 2 minutes and you have to draw the position outline within that time. You can then capture the essence of the subject very soon and then get the flow of drawing without looking away from the subject.

These steps are to be followed to get the feel of the subject and get the model on the paper. You must remember that you cannot take too much time and must not take off your eyes from the model and keep drawing the subject from the feel of the lines and masses.