Benefits of Gesture Drawings

[Strela]

I've been doing a large number of 30 second figure sketches off of PoseMania. Last night I did 20 pages of them, 12-15 sketches per page. Other days I usually do 12 pages or so.

How much benefit comes from this sort of practice if kept up? What sorts of exercises could I add to my practice to get additional benefit? The several hours this takes is in addition to other art, usually painting or pen sketching. My biggest weakness is the human figure and face, so these are the things I'm working on hardest-- what else can I do? Should I start master paintings or wait?

[Elwell]

The advantage is far less than if you were working from an actual model. The Posemaniacs figures are just standard Poser figures (DAZ's Michael and Victoria) with an anatomical texture applied. If you don't have access to a model, try recording something like gymnastics or dance off the TV (or look on youtube) and pause that for poses.

[J Wilson]

If you are looking for natural looking poses, yeah pose maniacs is limited in how useful it can be.

A dvd player in your computer is pretty handy. Getting nice crisp stills to work from is great for a lot of different reference. That dvd player and your local video store gives you a lot of options to study poses, lighting, facial expressions/emotions etc, not to mention environments, props and costumes and all sorts of other goodies.

[Strela]

I've had many jobs in my time and let's just say that video "action shots," to say nothing of crisp stills, are not a problem.

But let's just say that I had the ideal, a live model at my beck and call. What adjuncts, if any, would you recommend? I've been trying to do 8 hours a day but I find that I burn out on gestures at around 3... my brain melts and I just can't do another.

[J Wilson]

With all things, it's best to vary things up. Quick gestures are very valuable, but so are longer poses where you really spend your time trying to refine the image. Different types of studies develope different skills.

While it's admirable you are doing so many, I think it might do you more good to do only 2-3 pages of gestures (often as warm ups), and then move onto longer studies where you spend more time really picking out anatomy, lighting, and work on different kinds of observational skills.

[armando]

Pose maniacs, I believe, has only limited usefulness. As others say, I think it's only useful for short study periods, warmups, as a supplement to other types of drawing. I believe gesture drawing is an excercise in proprioception http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception. It doesn't give us visual information but physical information. Like closing our eyes and sensing the movement of our body, lifting an object with our eyes closed, touching something with our eyes closed. The posemaniacs videogame characters don't communicate the kind of physical info that a real human does.

[Strela]

"I believe gesture drawing is an excercise in proprioception "

I was just thinking this last night when trying to draw while looking at the subject and not at my paper. It's difficult because the scale of drawings is always different so your hand can't learn a consistent idea of how far it should be moving, sort of like what happens on a wacom if you turn the tablet slightly in the middle of a drawing-- it's impossible to learn the new orientation.

The thing about posemaniacs is that many of the poses are so bizarre that it forces you to really think about what you're drawing and to think fast. I'm probably going to keep on doing it until I stop seeing improvement. Also I will work on getting in some life drawing as well.

[Elwell]

There's a good thread on the how and why of gesture drawing here (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=52023).

[Strela]

thanks, I hadn't seen that thread. One thing I do notice about Posemaniacs and the extremely awkward angles is that when a more normal angle comes up, it's suddenly easy to draw. The foreshortening problems associated with drawing someone standing on a glass table, from beneath, are something that I think might be good from that site, but I do definitely see the thing about stiffness. I just think that my art isn't to the point yet where awkwardness in the model can come through-- I would be HAPPY if I could capture that. Also the fact that it spoonfeeds you at a hell ride pace.

I do hate it when I give advice to someone much less experienced who doesn't seem to listen, but I think that site has helped me dramatically-- I can now draw 30 second sketches in mostly proper proportion and perspective and that's something I could never do before. The difference between my sketches from a month ago and now is quite shocking, not that I'm any great shakes now but the things I used to draw kind of horrify me to look at.

I need to start with Nicolaidas and Loomis again now that I've got some more human form under my belt.

[Twelve]

If your not so good with quick gesture's. I think pose maniacs can help get you somewhat reasonable results before you go out into public places and do these same gesture exercise using real life people in real life motion and situations. That's what I was planning anyway :)

[armando]

"I believe gesture drawing is an excercise in proprioception "

I was just thinking this last night when trying to draw while looking at the subject and not at my paper. It's difficult because the scale of drawings is always different so your hand can't learn a consistent idea of how far it should be moving, sort of like what happens on a wacom if you turn the tablet slightly in the middle of a drawing-- it's impossible to learn the new orientation.

The thing about posemaniacs is that many of the poses are so bizarre that it forces you to really think about what you're drawing and to think fast. I'm probably going to keep on doing it until I stop seeing improvement. Also I will work on getting in some life drawing as well.

Part of it is hand eye coordination, but I meant more to say the articulation of the body. In Bridgman's Life Drawing he says something like: the action of the body is given by the way the three main masses are orientated. How the head, torso, and pelvis, are bent, twisted, or tilted in relation to each other. Then of course the smaller forms are related to those big three, and figures are related to other figures...
It's like if someone throws a ball at you either you're going to dodge or catch it. So first you sense what's happening in the environment then you react to it. In drawing first you sense the action of the body, then you react to it with your drawing hand.
I think it's better to just work from photos rather than posemaniacs. Use posemaniacs as a supplement, don't put too many hours into it. You could buy pose books, Muybridge, Illustrator reference books. You get people doing realistic poses, not just positioning their bodies this way and that, and you also get a lot more variety of people, more variety of things and shapes.

[Strela]

One thing Posemaniacs certainly doesn't have is non-rigid physics modeling of the physical structure. Peoples' bodies do settle differently in different positions and the Posemaniacs poses are essentially in zero gravity. I think that's a huge reason Poser can look so wooden. You wouldn't think it would but there's something deeper going on that it doesn't model.

[mairuku]

I use it to loosen my lines / warm-ups just because it's convenient. Nothing more.
I definitely don't rely on it for substantial anatomical practice. Live models are the best, photography second-best.