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January 21st, 2010 |
Well, here I am, lol!
After and still now going on issues in Real Life, I took up the courage to actually draw again. :)
So, here is my terribly out of practice scan for the day, I found a cool website called posemaniacs [url]
and I just started using the 30 second drawing tool, as you can see, terrible, but oh well, practice makes perfect. :) |
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| Comments |
| Name |
Time |
| Stickman |
January 26th, 2010 |
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The process of looking at a pose for 30 seconds and attempting to capture it is called "gesture drawing." It's extremely useful, and has a specific goal. The goal of gesture drawing is to capture the pose in a way that you can recreate the figure later, but have the pose recorded. This means you need as much useful information as possible in as little strokes/time as possible. (Note that not everyone uses the same definitions. Art is notorious for having wildly varying definitions, making it difficult to communicate. The above is my definition of gesture drawing.)
There are a number of different ways to achieve this. One time, I took a piece of charcoal, turned it on its side so I had a wide surface, and used it to trace contours. By pushing harder on one side, one edge would be dark and the other light, giving it a feeling of depth or roundness. Thus, with a single, careful stroke, or maybe two, I could create an entire limb. It let me gesture out a pose extremely quickly, and looked really neat. I got the idea from some examples in Bammes' Human Anatomy book: [url]
The gesture drawing method I use most often, though, is because of the limitations of the media (pencils, pens, computer tablet). I tend to use shapes and lines. [url] By outlining certain important forms -- the edges of the ribcage and hips, the head, the curve of the forearm and calf, the direction of the feet and hands, I can quickly record the information I need in a pose. Of course, those ones I linked aren't actually from reference. I used those as the start of the drawing so I could take 30-60 seconds and see if the pose was going to work out, so I didn't waste an hour only to find out I'd made the arms too short, etc.
Feel free to design your own "gesture drawing" system. You'll find that certain poses are more effective with certain methods. If you're using something that's extremely foreshortened, drawing the shape of the head overlapping the shape of the ribcage, overlapping the other shapes might be much more effective and visually understandable than trying to use sticks and circles.
Oh, lastly for the gestures. If you look at my own example above, you'll notice that I started each one off with a single line. Using a C curve, or an S curve (or the reversed variety of each). Because of the way the human spine is built, those four shapes (C, S, and the reverses) are the only shapes that the human spine can make. By quickly gesturing out one of those shapes, within only a couple seconds you can have a very simple base to create some flow in your images. Flow being how well the eye travels from one point to another, smoothly and without interrupting jerks.
You traced around the perimeter of the figure for each of this. That's effective in some situations -- like my extreme foreshortening example, when you want to outline the shapes. But for gesture drawing, it's often more effective to draw inside the figure -- to record the flow, rather than the actual outline.
There are also two qualities of lines that you used. Along the "top" (left side) we see the infamous "hairy" lines. Unsure lines that overlap each other. Extremely common, and I've been told it takes years for an art school to unroot that habit out of aritsts. On the right, we see solid, sure lines. I'm an advocate for the latter kind, the solid, sure lines. However, it's not necessary to complete a circuit of the entire figure using this line. It's enough to cover a specific curve -- such as the shoulder, followed by the upper arm, then the forearm, as separate lines.
Posemaniacs.com is definitely a useful site. Nothing will beat a real live nude model, but when you don't have one available (which is probably pretty often) using something like that site is definitely advisable.
Once you get comfortable with "gesture drawing" and find that you can record poses fairly well, test it out in real life. Visit a coffee shop or some other open sit-down place, and see if you can capture people standing in line, sitting and chatting. And if the gesture you end up drawing looks comfortable and "in action."
If you don't have any, grab some anatomy books. The Bammes one above, is decent. Goldfinger's is a great reference book that outlines and explains every single visible muscle. Andrew Loomis' books are considered fantastic, if you can find them. There's probably countless tutorials online, too.
It basically comes down to: bones make up the underlying form, and in places where they approach the surface they make a bump or a dip. They create the hard parts of the body. Muscles attach to bones and enable movement. They create the soft parts of the body. Everything else is skin, fat, and hair. It's just a matter of learning the bones, the muscles, and everything else. Learning the biggest ones, or the largest muscle groups, will help you the most. And once you're comfortable with those, the more you learn about the rest means you can add in more details.
Glad to see you posting again, and I look forward to more! :D Sorry it took me so long to leave a comment. |
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