Hi everyone! 😊
I don't know if you've heard of Proko, it's a YouTube channel and website with lots of valuable drawing tutorials, and I highly recommend you check it out.
Today's exercise is from it.
I sometimes show you gesture drawings on my blog, and I have insisted that it is crucial to practise dynamism in figure drawing.
The aim is to be able to simplify our drawings to a few lines and curves in order to emphasise movement and pose.
So, what do sea elephants have to do with it?
Sea elephants are quite easy to draw. It's just a little volume, not so much detail. So it is actually easier to draw than a complex human body, where you have to learn the anatomy meticulously.
The simple form of the sea elephant allows us to concentrate on the volume and the curves.
We could compare the drawings I made above with those below to emphasise my point: the upper ones are really bad compared to the lower ones, which I think are the best of my series.
Why is that?
Firstly, because of the line: the left one above is clumsy and wobbly - the line is not continuous. In nature there is no line - a line in a drawing represents the end of a volume. And we should always think of drawing in this way.
So an imprecise line goes with really limp, fragile subjects.
But with animals, most of them have a solid structure that tightens and relaxes with effort.
They have well-defined volumes.
So we feel the volume more in the lower left drawing. I felt more confident in my line and therefore had more consistent volumes. As the sea elephant pulls its head back, wrinkles form at the nape of the neck as it contracts. The opposite side looks free and light - it's a nice contrast that adds interest to the drawing.
Finally, we can see an intention in the gesture - the elephant seals look like divas, they have a personality.
My advice for the gesture exercise is not to start drawing too quickly.
Start by looking at the subject, what feeling does it give you, does it look stern in this posture? Does he look light or heavy?
If you have an intention before you start drawing, you'll translate it naturally with little effort.
The one above was a great synthesis of this exercise. There are a lot of sea elephants in the picture and it forces me to try to get a general flow between us. I tried to use simple shapes and concentrate on the curves to guide the eye through the informal mass of sea elephants.
I hope you will like it! 😊
I will have more sessions like this as I needed to practise what I learned. For years I tended to draw only in lines. Thinking about volume and gesture is actually quite new to me.
See you soon for more creations! :)
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