/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

[Anonymous No.4570190]

Each time I try to draw gesture, doing sessions from say, CroquisCafe, they just look like a horrible mess of lines that hardly resemble a figure/show anything, what the hell can I do?

[Anonymous No.4570194]

>>4570190
Maybe use your gesture study as the op instead of asking another stupid question.

[Anonymous No.4570197]

>>4570194

I erased it all out of disgust

[Anonymous No.4570206]

>>4570190
You probably fell for the "feel the flow, don't draw the outlines" meme.
Just draw the outlines, but simplify them a lot to just get the broad shape and ignore the details. Like literally what is going on in the pic you posted.

[Anonymous No.4570209]

>>4570190
you need to post it for us to critique it and point out what you're doing wrong.

[Anonymous No.4570210]

>>4570197
>>4570209

[Anonymous No.4570211]

>>4570190
Also the most important thing to get out of "gesture" (I don't even like the word) is the proportions. All the feeling the flow and staying loose in the world won't do shit for you if the proportions of your drawing are wrong. Go slow, mark out the proportions correctly, then go from there.

[Anonymous No.4570220]

>>4570197
There is no point to talk. Clean this ridiculous you head from shit first or you are ngmi. It's much worse than bad gestures.

[Anonymous No.4570221]

>>4570210
I looked at the number of the replies at that time, that wasn't OP, and still they should be able to show or produce some sketches

[Anonymous No.4570226]

>>4570221

Let me get my printer/scanner hooked up and I'll see what I can do, if that thing still works.

[Anonymous No.4570227]

>>4570226
Just take a fucking photo

[Anonymous No.4570267]

>>4570227

[Anonymous No.4570270]

>>4570227

Reference, I did it super quick but it would be shit either way honestly.

[Anonymous No.4570272]

>>4570267
Forget gesture for now and focus on building a body with simple shapes. And perspective, always perspective.

[Anonymous No.4570278]

>>4570272

Gesture is the first thing everyone apparently says you should do first.

There's so much shit to learn that a structured approach seems to be what would help me the most, so I was going based off this curriculum someone made on reddit

[Anonymous No.4570300]

Read the sticky OP, that's why we have it.

>>4570278
>figure drawing, the most complicated subject, comes first
>no mention of shape language or design
>composition & storytelling in term 1
I hate these cookie cutter lists

[Anonymous No.4570311]

>>4570300

I've read the sticky more times than I can count, I don't exactly learn the best from books. Plus I've watched/come across every resource under the sun. I just don't know where to go at this point.

I'd love to be able to draw/paint portraits, both traditionally and digitally, same goes for concept art, comics, that sort of thing. Those are main goals really. So I'd need to work on landscapes and obviously characters to.

I just....I dunno

[Anonymous No.4570335]

>>4570300

What do you suggest if using books doesn't suit me best in terms of learning?

[Anonymous No.4570448]

>>4570267
Work on your proportions before anything else.
>>4570270
>I did it super quick
Don't do that, it's just a dumb meme that leaves you with nothing but pages of scribbles.

[Anonymous No.4570451]

>>4570278
>le do this then do this then do this
Save yourself some trouble and throw this shit out the window.

[Anonymous No.4570455]

>>4570335
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ctcyjdq52kuyoke/Effective_Art_Study_Guide.pdf/file

[Anonymous No.4572780]

>>4570455
was expecting a troll doc, but actually helpful. thanks anon

[Anonymous No.4572845]

what the fuck is the webm size limit on /ic/?
I’m trying to post an example of how I do gesture and I can’t upload the 443kb file

[Anonymous No.4572849]

>>4570455
sauce? who wrote this?

[Anonymous No.4572879]

>>4570190
Do gesture instead of outlining you dumb /beg/

[Anonymous No.4572884]

>>4570267
That's not gesture, that's outlining. Gesture is about FEELING and putting down a blueprint to build on later.

[Anonymous No.4574270]

>>4570278
that list is retarded.
every list like this is retarded.

>>4570267
you, specifically, need to spend much much more time considering what lines you're putting down and sorting out alignment and proportion. you dont have the mileage to slap down something quick.
give yourself plenty of time, do a couple attempts on any given pic(one from memory too). and take one attempt a step further: put in basic forms and work out the problems of deciding exact orientation and perspective so you get a better idea of where the gesture is going.

[Anonymous No.4574283]

Don't get stuck on doing gesture. Just spend some time practicing and move on. Your training should be cyclical.
If you look at the proko figure drawing course it's broken into: Gesture, The Bean, Landmarks, Mannequinization, Robo Bean, Proportions & Measuring, Shading
You should spend a few days on each and then move on even if you hate your drawings and feel you don't understand a stage. Then go back to gesture and start again. Each stage helps you understand every other stage a bit more. Alongside the exercises in the course you should keep a sketchbook and be doing drawings of the figure from photos (or life if possible) where you incorporate skills you learn from the course. And of course draw things that you are interested in and enjoy to retain your passion.

[Anonymous No.4574407]

>>4572849
idk, but I agree with it. I've heard multiple good artists talk about the importance of drawing refs from memory before.

[Anonymous No.4574443]

>>4570190
Keep practicing. It's not going to be easy and you're going to have a horrible and shitty time doing it as well. Just keep doing it and you'll get better.

[Anonymous No.4575085]

isn't this >>4574443 an example of >>4572884 "outlining instead of creating a blueprint"?

[Anonymous No.4576107]

>>4575085
i havent read his chink book, but those drawings have been taken several steps beyond just gesture to include anatomy, so of course the contour is worked out

[Anonymous No.4576206]

>>4570206
Isn't that literally what Proko does despite spouting "draw action lines" bs

[Anonymous No.4576208]

>>4576206
That's correct, yes.

[Anonymous No.4576219]

>>4570206
You fell for the calling things memes that aren’t memes meme.

[Anonymous No.4576224]

>>4576219
Explain to me what's going on in this drawing then >>4570190

[Anonymous No.4576264]

>>4576224

>blog post ahead. No apologies. Read only if interested.
The first drawing is a slightly better than average stick figure. But that has nothing to do with gesture and flow. The second one makes use of fractured “rhythms” such as the Reilly rhythms (which if this is Proko, he seems to have learned from his teacher in a fairly watered down form).
“Flow”, if it is used by a competent artist/teacher as a term refers to rhythms. It isn’t some abstract new age nonsense term or concept.
Moreover it’s not really gesture either so I’m not sure what the OP pic has to do with gesture per se. It has a line of action and then stick figure stuff tacked on.
I think he did that part of his courses when he was still young. He should change or farm that stuff out.

Gesture can be a nebulous term but it’s not meaningless or a meme. It’s not really connected to proportion, rhythm or armature as many suggest. It doesn’t help that every teacher has their own concept of it and teaches it differently.

Essentially, historically, it has usually meant “capturing the essence of what is happening (or what the figure is doing”. If you look at Daumier or Degas or Rodin’s gestures you will see something they have in common: relaxed or loose, mostly continuous, exploratory lines, spontaneity, and a tendency for the lines to capture the observation, eye movement or thinking without self-consciousness or a schematic/process.

The book that teaches the most historically consistent concept of gesture is Nicolaides. Im not saying it’s the best, or that that modifications that have evolved wouldn’t serve some people better.
I’m just old and didnt see the term get so fucked up until the last 20 years or so.

[Anonymous No.4576279]

>>4576264
>Reilly
>Nicolaides
Big red flags right there.

[Anonymous No.4576285]

>>4576279
Red flags about what or whom. I’m just explaining, as asked, what was going on in OP’s pic.
As for Nicolaides, I don't particularly like his book or system or schedule, but his system of gestures wasn’t pulled out of his ass. It was taught to him by his teachers who were direct links to the history I am talking about. It can be seen, as I said, in the work of Degas, Daumier and Rodin. Even some of Sargents sketches use it. And it’s what they all meant by gesture.
Doesn’t matter what you think about it. It’s just what it is.

[Anonymous No.4576311]

Also, another book that teaches a more historically connected concept of gesture is Nathan Goldsteins book “Responsive Drawing”. Actually I think he covers it in all three of his drawing books.
If the Art Student’s League’s teachers are a red flag than try these books.

While I’m here, an alternative to gesture as a primarily line-based exercise, and which incidentally is more connected to proportion as it relates to “plastic” forms is Bammes - where he uses really basic masses drawn/painted with a brush or flat side of a charcoal.

[Anonymous No.4576331]

>>4576264
the history of these things gets confused by teachers cherrypicking sketches and claiming they teach The One True Way of the Old Masters.

>last 20 years
eh, gurney gave 4 basic categories for getting down motion/poses in his book from the 80s, with nico style scribble distinct from cleaner s/c curve based gesture.
whatever the deeper history is, i think it matches what most people are referring to by gesture currently.

[Anonymous No.4576418]

I don’t know too much about his personal history but Gurney’s early sketches that I’ve seen looked like design sketches.
Why is this noteworthy?
In the 70’s and 80’s design schools trained many of the people who are teaching art today. Their systems were drawn from a number of key sources where you can see a family resemblance (as you can with the somewhat older lineage I am talking about) If you look at Disney and other animation books like Walt Stanchfield or Preston Blair the basic bulding blocks of the line of action and the “bean” or blockform shapes is taught, along with “squash and stretch” and the vocabulary of straights, “S’s” and “C’s”. It is upon this foundation “constructive” drawing as we typically know it is based.
This system used the term “gesture” but as I have said it was a mod or evolution from an older one, to serve a need or function, such as repeatability for animation. And is in no way inferior as such.
Nic’s, Goldstein’s (and Degas, Daumier, Rodin et al) were all based on and geared towards observational drawing for the most part, and was, at least in part aimed more at internalizing complex relationships rather than as a basis for design/construction.
Anyway, whether one draws on this “design/animation school” lineage or the dusty old fine art lineages I am speaking about there only arise problems (for some) when you are trying to learn a coherent system through mixing and matching systems that don’t always use the same words to mean the same things. What’s worse, you have people mockingly throwing in, blurring between and meme-a-fying ideas of “flow” and “feel the form” and getting it all mixed in with other more coherent systems of gesture training.

[Anonymous No.4576436]

[Anonymous No.4576445]

[Anonymous No.4576456]

>>4576264
>>4576285
>>4576311
>>4576418
pyw

[Anonymous No.4576461]

>>4576456
Yeah that guy just reminds me of myself a few months when I went on a reading/watching binge of the resources I hoarded from /ic/. Then never practiced drawing and instead just replied to people while shooting out names and passages from the books/videos I consumed with no actual understanding.
Slowly trying to just draw everyday now.

[Anonymous No.4576486]

>>4576331
I liked your post btw. But regarding the teachers saying they teach the “one true way of the masters” - I agree it is a dubious claim. There is more of an *actual* known lineage to the teachers of 19th century - ie Carolus Duran, Gerome, Sickert Etc by way of Bridgman, Sargent, Eaton and their students etc, who, although they did brand and innovate their own ways of doing things, still retained what would have been taught to them as basics. I don’t necessarily think there are many, if any, still teaching with such a direct link except those who are directly linked with Reilly, who while he learned from such masters devised an almost entirely novel system, where “rhythms” rather than gesture per se were the basic building blocks.

[Anonymous No.4576503]

>>4576461
>>4576456
Fuck off both o youse. Im not posting
I can draw just fine. Im old and was lucky enough to learn from some very interesting teachers with solid pedigree back in the early-mid 80’s.
Im sorry you don’t like my posts. Hopefully somebody will have some use for them.

[Anonymous No.4576508]

>>4576486
Even then it is funny to see Fred Fixler "corrected" Reilly and then Jeff Watts "corrected" the version of Reilly he got from Fixler (though I don't think Fixler was even teach at his school by the time Jeff got there. I think he said he learned from Mark Westermoe or someone else at the Fixler school). Then you have a watered down version of Watts via Proko now.

[Anonymous No.4576546]

>>4576508
Yeah.
I think Watts learned from Glen Orbik who learned from Fixler.
From what I gather, the Reilly method is difficult to impart because it’s as much if not more about finding changing rhythms In the context of each new Dynamic pose and it gets really complicated in the arms and legs so people tend to wing it with those. It ends up pretty samey though.
The problem with the Reilly method is that the guy, for all his obsession with developing a system couldn’t be arsed to write a fucking book. The one guy who Reily signed off on teaching his shit at the ASLNY, who kept teaching well into the future was Faragasso. Which, if you’ve seen his book may have absorbed and relayed his system but God damn if his own drawings arent stiff and weird as all shit. Also, we tend to think of Reily as being mostly the figure rhythms but I think he actually spent more time on a painting system involving value strings or something. There’s an out of print Faragasso book about it.

[Anonymous No.4576562]

>>4570270
Nice ass.

[Anonymous No.4576614]

>>4570190
Congratulations! You've now figured out that some of Proko's vids are indeed trash that don't explain shit and miss tons of crucial information.
Get Hampton book + video course, thank me later. Just after the first chapter, you'll see it too.

[Anonymous No.4577819]

>>4576614
hamptons equally trash at best. the only thing op will learn is to start recognizing garbage when he sees it

[Anonymous No.4578221]

>>4570211
Hampton says not to care much for proportions during the gesture stage. He emphasizes it a lot in his course.

[Anonymous No.4578231]

>>4576614
>>4577819

Hampton is a great introduction to constructing anatomy. But his chapter and video on gesture is not good. Just as vague as most resources.

[Anonymous No.4578484]

>>4576503
I have found the history lesson useful ancient one thank you

[Anonymous No.4578492]

>>4578221
Hampton says to not measure. He doesn't say to not care about proportions. Two different things.
But by all means, start your drawing off with the proportions wrong and see what happens.

[Anonymous No.4580058]

>>4578492
He specifically uses the word "proportions" in both the book and video.

Nobody said about starting it wrong. Just that it shouldn't be the focus at this stage. That's why I said "not to care much". Because you're previous reply emphasized it so much.