In Week 7 of Gesture Drawing with Alex Woo, we covered the final topic of the course which was story. The goal was to take everything we've learned thus far (the visual punctuation and grammar) and create a narrative from a sequence of the model's poses. It was okay to change a pose if necessary to help sell the story. I found this to be one of the toughest assignments of the course and, for the first set, ended up having to change parts of the remaining poses to suit the narrative I saw from the first pose.

In the second set, I drew in blue pencil and stayed within the 4-minute timeline but, to do so, had to keep most of the poses as they were. Because some of the poses did not feel natural to me and the arrangement felt bizarre so I found it very difficult to come up with anything other than golfing and the narrative felt weak as a result.

Week 8 was a review and wrap-up. Our teacher also recounted some of his background and his journey as an artist. It was interesting to hear his story and to find some similarities in the art that inspired us, growing up. I've learned much from this course and glad I took it. It has certainly helped me get a little faster at drawing poses and coming up with narratives.

I am looking forward to my next course on Pictorial Composition with Nathan Fowkes, a veteran in the entertainment industry who has worked on a lot of my favourite Dreamworks films.

Now that the My Beloved Monster comic is out of the way, I thought I'd get back to where I left off in my Gesture Drawing class. Week 6 was about Extrapolation. In gesture drawing, it is the process of seeing beyond the surface of what's in front of you and drawing out the idea behind the pose onto another physiology. Week 5's homework of studying the anatomy of an animal of our choosing got us ready for this.

For our first assignment, we were to select 10 of our favourite examples of extrapolation from either animated or live action films where the animals show emotions and mannerisms we can relate to. We had to be careful not to select poses where they were overly anthropomorphized. I chose some of my favourite animal characters from Disney and one from Sony Pictures. It kind of makes me want to watch these movies all over again. These characters are so memorable and enjoyable to watch.

The second part of the homework assignment was to take the idea behind the model's pose and draw it using our chosen animal instead.

Some of these poses were more challenging than others and took longer than I thought. After using some of these principles on my recent comic book with a cat character, it made me see the value in this exercise coming up with body language for the cat on my own.

Schoolism Gesture Drawing - Weeks 7 and 8

Schoolism - Gesture Drawing Week 6

Chalk Full of Dreams