Gesture class homework

[Heather Boyd]

@carlianne 18 and the boy in the last has helped me hash out my latest character a bit more -these are great by the way.

[carlianne]

@Heather-Boyd oh that's so cool! I'd love to see it

[Norman Morana]

Hi Carlianne,

These are awesome, it's great to see people working on the figure! I do have some feedback for you, I hope you don't mind but I drew over your drawings a bit to help explain some areas. Really two things stood out for improvement right now. Life drawing can be a life long endeavor, the figure can just be hard to draw sometimes.

The thing that stood out to me the most was the balance being off on some sketches. You'll see I have some blue lines on some characters, this is to show the area where the center of gravity is. I've head you can find this in a couple places, like from the ear straight down to the ground. I think generally you can find this with feeling, but I'd try to see if you can find the center either on one of the ears or the chin. And when I say ear, I mean when you can see the head in 3/4, not so much for front on views. I see with the batter, as you redrew the pose, you put the character more in balance.

The other I see, is the ground plane. when I was doing figure drawing regularly, I would draw a little ellipse to help show me the ground plane so I could better plant the feet.

There's a million things to think about with life/gesture drawing. There can be a lot more to discussing balance. It's a little difficult to summarize in a couple draw overs and some text. Hope this gives you a good jumping off point. I love see you do these in non ballpoint pen. Maybe get some tracing paper if you don't have some already. Thats fun for going back and trying to figure out the structure underneath your gesture and experiment with pushing the pose.

Please understand this is a great step, can't wait to see how these progress!

(take the running character with a grain of salt, that was mostly just drawing over it for the sake of drawing over it)

[carlianne]

@Norman-Morana thanks so much Norman! I really appreciate you taking the time to draw over and write up such a nice explanation! I totally agree with your assessment and I'll look out for that.

My process is to draw in pen then take a photo and clean it up digitally like I did in the final slightly cleaner illustration with both characters. I like pen because I can focus just on the idea and not get too noodley with it

I especially love your idea of adding the ground plane! I'll try that out next time.

[Norman Morana]

@carlianne You're very welcome, happy to help

Oh yeah, you got it lol.

[carlianne]

Lesson two. I do feel like I'm improving already. These were much more controlled.

Sorry for the scribbles, my two year old got to most of my sketchbook

[Pamela Fraley]

@carlianne these are great and I love the little additions from your two year old. I need to take this class. It’s amazing how much you can get from a good gesture. It’s so easy to rely on facial expression and forget about body language to illustrate emotion. I feel like the emotions are really coming through in these, though... without much in the form of detailed facial expressions.

[carlianne]

@Pamela-Fraley that's so true! And if you think about it the face is really small compared to the body, so you're really missing out on story telling when you don't push it the body language too!

I'll tell my daughter you like her drawing

[Lorna H]

I don't have any feedback other than that I think these sketches are great and it's awesome seeing you working through the examples and also looking at the draw overs and comments of @Norman-Morana. I just wanted to say I love your sketches and you have kick started me into tackling the gesture class!

[carlianne]

@Lorna-H oh yay that's great! And thank you so much!

[carlianne]

For myself trying to see if I can apply the gestures to characters, I changed her expression a little because I thought it might be more engaging to look at the flowers, but I might have lost some of the energy that way. Let me know!

[Jacy13]

@carlianne I really like what you did here! She's definitely "clutching those flowers happily", haha. The facial expression is perfect. Maybe if you pushed the pose a little more like in the gesture you did; it would give her that little bit of added energy. You're doing some great and expressive work over here