Gesture Drawing: Approaching The Figure

compressed charcoal gesture drawings
in a sketch book. 

Gesture drawing, my own personal brand of doodling. I began my ascent into representational figure drawing with a genuine love and interest in gestural drawings. Too this day, my sketch books are littered with small, medium, and large renditions of people and every day objects in fresh, quick lines. This lesson will focus on movement and rhythm and focus on reteaching students how to look at objects.

The most important thing about gestural drawings is that they are quick. An accomplished gesture maker can render an entire figure from head to two in well under 10 seconds. To begin this lesson, I would show a brief power point containing gesture work from artists (famous and unknown).I would emphasize the light and fresh marks of gesture and notify them of the time constraints. Like the contour drawing lesson, students will focus on their subject rather than their paper.

Gesture drawings in compressed charcoal on drawing paper.

In the warm up exercise, I would supply each student with plenty of newsprint (ideally each student would have their own pad of newsprint), and vine charcoal. I like vine best for gestural drawings because its workable and inherently light. Contrast can be built up easily and the freshness of the medium automatically forces students to reflect its qualities. Students will be standing up, facing the projection screen where I would start by showing gesture drawings of figures and ask students to copy them--under a 2 minute warning. They will do five of these kinds of drawings. Next, Students will create their own gestures using clothed figure models from [[http://artists.pixelovely.com/ ]]. The class mode pose generator features clothed models of both genders in intricate and interesting poses. They will do five more at two minutes. Continuing this trend, they will complete 10 poses at 1 minute, and 15 at 30 seconds. The excitement of the time constraint will be interesting to see in the classroom.

Gesture drawings from my first year in art school. Compressed
charcoal on newsprint. 

 I'm not sure I would encourage students to develop their gestures into a formal and complete work of art. For me, gesture is loose, free, and rhythmic, and that is the beauty of it--its not developed. Perhaps students would explore different mediums to further develop their gesture drawings. Water color, India Ink, pastel, and toned paper would be exciting choices for students to have and could create interesting tonal developments within the mark.