Spartan Camp #233 - 50 gestures + Optional "Scribbly Gestures" Study

[Anthis]

Spartan Camp #233 - 50 gestures + Optional "Scribbly Gestures" Study

The aim is to produce 50 gestures by Sunday the 5th of August.

- The gestures can be of anything, human, animal, cavorting capybaras.... You can draw full figures, but you can also go for heads, arms, eyes, or anything specific. All media can be used, both digital or traditional. Coloured or black/white. Quick scribbles or long studies. Imagination or referenced. Clothed or nude. Specifics are up to you!

- In addition to this, participants can choose to do an Optional "Scribbly Gestures" Study, in any medium.
Additional notes on this weeks’ Optional Study:


The background
A gesture is a quick representation of the body, its form, motion and its shape. How does one draw gestures? One possibility is using quick scribbles. Some of you may recognize this as the method advocated by Kimon Nicolaides ( "The natural way to draw", 1941).

While we're at it, let's quote the man himself:

"You should draw not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing... Gesture has no precise edges, no forms. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space"

The gesture drawing method he advocated is still practised and used by many artists. In short, it is focused on using loose scribbly lines to grasp the essence of the gesture. You capture life, not details or meticulously pretty lines. As you may see in the references, gestures can look somewhat impressionistic but they will always have the gesture in there. Some advice using a single line without lifting your pencil or use the method without looking at the paper- this is not necessary for now. Take a look at the reference for some visual examples.

The exercise
Include one or several gestures using the "scribbling" method as described above or in the references.

Reference
I will focus on references with examples and explanations rather than poses (you can use gesture drawing tools or imagination!)
Link 1 - Examples, explanation, walktrough.
Link 2 - Explanation, examples from Nicolaides + masters
Link 3- Explanation on gestures overall + scans from various books including Nicolaides'. Also has a download link for the book which I have not tested.
Link 4, Link 5 - Good examples by other artists on a different forum.

Next weeks optional
Quick portraits study. Quick gesture drawings of portraits as opposed to full figures. Reference will be provided.


As always- reference advised, not obligatory. Colour, medium, time frame, any specifics are up to you! Good luck and have fun! And feel free to ask questions!


50 poses is a challenge, but don't hurry or stress yourself reaching it! Focus on drawing, as practising is the main goal of this exercise.

Criticizing each other is highly encouraged!! Share constructive criticism, reference images and resources!! Let's help each other get better!

Come on soldiers! Flex those muscles!!


HALL OF FAME - SPARTAN CAMP #231

Obstfelder
Hamorhage
AdrianNagorski
cumquat
Zombie chinchilla
Trozax713
Animare
SmallPoly
J8stine

[Guardian G.I.]

I'm in.
Gotta do something later on.

[littlebones]

Gonna jump into this again, I think. Glad to see you still running it, Anthis.

[Zombie_chinchilla]

I was honestly confused for half a second wondering what the heck the "placeholder" study was. Definitely joining in again.

[White Rose]

ooh.. I wanna join. I'll start working on it right now.

[Obstfelder]

Kicking off:

(Seem to be having trouble uploading images. So I'll wait until it's fixed.)

[Anthis]

A description for the optional study has been added, as well as reference.

I deleted my second post since everything seems to be working again and it is now obsolete. Let's get started!

Obstfelder - Not sure what was going on but glad to see we're back up. Love these gestures. Overall you seem more confident with the thin lines in your first scan. The big brush is somewhat constraining when you use it for 'lineart' such as in the 6th and 7th pose of your 2nd scan. In the 10th pose (holding the gun) and the girl in the bottom left you seem to have focused more on the values and shapes, and they look real good. The typical '3d sense'. Just thoughts, see if you agree.

[Zombie_chinchilla]

Mine from today.





I'll do some scribbles tomorrow.

[AdrianNagorski]

[littlebones]

Here's 30 one-minuters. They are not up to snuff.

Obstfelder, I think I'm going to try what you're doing next.

Crits when I'm not about to fall asleep!

[wla91]

Hey there guys! this motivated me to join, heres what i did today.

Tomorrow would be time for a few scribbly ones

Cheers!

[Animare]

60 second poses and 1 un-timed. Working in pen so I can't erase anything.
Addicted to watching the Olympics atm so going to try more based on them.

[Guardian G.I.]

Scribbly gestures, eh? A piece of cake - all of my gestures are scribbly, all of them. And judging by how the people from the reference links got better at gesture drawing (by sketching from a real model in a studio), my gestures are going to be scribbly forever!
Oh, and nice watercolor picture, Animare.

[Zombie_chinchilla]

Deep, heart content sigh.

[wla91]

A few more, i think thats enough haha

Zombie_chinchilla I recommend you to use less lines, with that i mean, try to express the movement of the body with a few strokes, and then part from that to give proportion and more shape to it, i hope it helps you!

Cheers!

[Obstfelder]

Anthis: I agree completely Didn't feel like I had a good flow with those rough brushes, and couldn't decide what to focus on. But for the longer value studies I had a clearer goal, and it went a little easier.

Made a few scribbly ones, and I feel that I managed to keep a stronger focus with these. I like this assignment.

[AdrianNagorski]

Went to the Pub, got drunk, sketched these . . . . .

[littlebones]

I BSed - no values here this time, a scant offering. But I have 15 more gestures to do, and then some scribbly ones.

I'll provide full crits on Monday.

[Animare]

i really love this scribble technique. Will start doing this often, it's a good warm up too, hopefully loosen up my drawings.
Using pictures from the olympics, great for exaggerated gestures.

[Hamorhage]

Whoahoohooaa...such a lot of nice work here! I'm gonna have to comment a bit later. I'm off to the shop to buy a new PC (if I find something within budget). I'm dissapointed I didn't do last weeks' assignement. I was on a 7 day shift, and just didn't get around to do it. This week I was on an early shift so got to go to life drawing again which I posted up below. Today I did some digital gestures and the scribble assignment, love the scribble assignment! Going to have to integrate this into my normal gestures. Probably going to do some gestures from imagination later on like a few of you do so well.

[Obstfelder]

Lunchbreak scribbles:

[littlebones]

Alright guys -- I'm done. Do the scribble gestures count towards the 50 gesture count?

[Animare]

Not impressed with myself this week.
Will do more with a longer time limit I think.

1, Scribble styles from watching 'live' dressage.
2, 30 - 60 seconds.
5, 5mins.

[J8stine]

I really enjoyed the scribbly gestures this week, I decided to keep everything fast and loose, with the scribbles at the end once I'd loosened up.

[Tim Murphy]

Not too late to throw my chit in is it?

[Zombie_chinchilla]

Not too late to throw my chit in is it?

You have until Sunday. Better late than never!

I might post a few more tomorrow. Hopefully.

[NightmareFH]

Long time lurker, first time poster.

Most things come easy to me, but drawing things, not so much. So I'm starting at the beginning... stick people! These were mostly from imagination, but I did throw in a few references. All done at work so I didn't have much access to decent source of reference. (Android phone can only go so far unfortunately).

[Obstfelder]

a lot of great work in this thread!

Littlebones: Those are great, but the outlined torso you have in several of them are ruining the motion. try to avoid flattening the forms so much. The value studies have very hard contrasts. it works for the backlit man, but the big white areas on the women make them look flat. Try to reserve the pure white for highlights only.

Animare: I like the live scribble studies. The positioning of the horses legs conveys the motion nicely. The tennis players are a little stiff. Your linework on the 5 min drawings is very straight. Maybe you could incorporate some of the curved lines from the fast gestures too make them move better?

J8stine: I like how confident your linwork looks in those first ones. And the scribbles look great. Maybe you should be more mindfull of the values when doing color gestures. They don't look like they have enough contrast.

Here are some more I did today. Playing around with scribbles and drawing a few faces. I liked the look of combining some loose scribbles with a few broader lines to model the forms slightly.

the color study took an hour probably. A bit longer than I was planning, but I struggled with the color and ended with it being much too saturated and orange.

[Guardian G.I.]

I've finished all 50.
There's a lot of screwed proportions up here.

[Zombie_chinchilla]

Aaaaand I do believe that's 50! Whew.