Schoolism - Gesture Drawing Week 6

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.

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Schoolism - Gesture Drawing Week 4

I've been behind in posting for various reasons, one of which is because I have been working on some art projects. Having said that, I've delayed long enough and should finish up my assignment and move onto Week 5 for the next topic.

Week 4 was about space, or creating spacial depth in our gesture drawings. We were given 1-minute timed poses to draw but this time we were told to strengthen the feeling of space within the drawing. This could be as simple as moving a foot or leg back, an arm forward, etc. Midway through the exercise we were told to switch to our non-dominant hand and follow the same rules. I went a little over the 1-minute mark for almost all the poses but even more so with my right-handed drawings. To be honest, I was lucky if I had enough control to draw a head in that time let alone change up the pose!

We were also asked to do about 2 hours worth of cafe sketching using both the dominant and non-dominant hand. However, lucky me, I managed to catch the flu this time and I still needed more practice drawing cats, so I chose to draw...my cat. I did manage to sneak in a drawing of my hubby but my right-handed drawing looks nothing like him; I unintentionally made him look like a 12-year old. Teehee! :)

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Schoolism - Gesture Drawing Week 2

This week we covered shapes where the goal was distillation or breaking things down to their essential forms. One of the assignments was to first sketch/paint out the basic shape for each pose from the provided video with each pose timed for 30 seconds. I used to think that 1‑minute poses were short but when each pose is such a short duration you find you have no choice but to get down to the bare essentials and quickly. We were to through the video again, quickly sketching out each pose but this time using the shapes we drew as a guide. Exaggeration or pushing the pose was encouraged; it's something I need to improve upon. This was a challenging exercise and really made me see things in a different way.

In the next exercise we had to find basic shapes using either 10 paintings or photos. I decided to use the same paintings and movies I posted from the previous week and, in some cases, I reconsidered some of my main lines of action.

For the last exercise, we were asked to do 2 hours of café sketching. Because I've been asked to work on a comic involving a cat as the main character, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and instead do cat sketching. I have to say that 30 seconds now seems like a luxury when trying to draw a very active pet.

My next post will be a little late because I'm taking some time off for the Toronto International Film Festival. 😁

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