LESSON 13 · DRAWING FUNDAMENTALS, DIGITALLY

Gesture is drawing what a figure is doing before you draw what it looks like. It is fast, deliberately rough, and it is the layer everything else in Module 3 sits on top of. Thirty seconds of good gesture will save you an hour of pushing a stiff, correctly-proportioned, completely lifeless drawing around.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L9, L10

• A blank 3000x2000 canvas, or the contact sheet download
• A phone or on-screen timer
• Reference: a sports or dance video you can pause, or photos you took yourself

WATCH

Aaron Blaise — A Disney animator explaining line of action on animals and clothed figures - the cleanest possible introduction.

Proko — Shows how gesture reads through clothing, which is what you will actually be drawing most of the time.

THE LESSON

Every drawing of a living thing is two drawings stacked on each other. Underneath is what the figure is doing - reaching, bracing, collapsing, sprinting. On top is what it looks like: proportion, anatomy, clothing folds. Most people start on top and never get underneath, which is why so many accurate figure drawings look like a mannequin propped in a corner.

Gesture is the underneath drawing. You give it thirty seconds, you draw it with the biggest, loosest marks you can manage, and you accept that it will not be pretty. It is not meant to be pretty. It is meant to be alive, and everything you learned in Lessons 9 to 12 gets built on top of it afterwards.

There is a sequence to protect here. Gesture, then construction, then contour. If you put construction first the figure will be solid and stiff. If you put gesture first the figure will be alive and, once you have constructed over it, solid as well.

The line of action is one single line describing the main thrust of the pose. One. Not a spine, not a skeleton - one long curve that carries the energy from the head, through the torso, and out through whichever limb is doing the work.

Two rules make it useful. It should almost never be straight, because a straight line has no direction of movement, and it should almost never contain two opposing curves that cancel each other out. A C curve says the figure is compressing or arcing. An S curve says the figure is twisting, one part going one way and another countering it. Those two shapes cover the overwhelming majority of interesting poses.

Draw the line of action first, before any body part exists, and exaggerate it. Push it further than the photo does. A pose read at speed loses energy on the way from your eye to your hand, so if you draw exactly what you see you end up with less than what you saw. Overshoot slightly and you land about right.

Once the line of action is down, the rest of the gesture is a set of secondary rhythms flowing off it. Aaron Blaise calls them C curves, S curves and I lines - the straights. You are looking for how a shape flows into the next one: the curve of the ribcage picking up where the neck left off, the sweep of an arm continuing the line of the shoulder rather than stopping at it.

The single most useful shape rule here is straight against curve. On any limb, one side is relatively straight and the opposite side is relatively curved, and they swap over as you travel down the limb. Draw both sides curved and the arm turns into a sausage. Draw both sides straight and it turns into a plank. Alternating them gives you a limb with tension in it.

Keep the marks going through the form, not around it. A gesture line that traces the outer edge of a leg is a contour drawn early. One that runs down the middle of the leg and out through the foot describes where the energy goes. Nobody sees your gesture layer in the finished piece - it only has to be right, not tidy.

Reference matters more here than anywhere else in this module, so be deliberate about where you get it. The pose-timer websites people usually recommend are off limits for this course: their image pools default to nude life-model photography, which is not appropriate here and is not necessary either.

Better sources, all of which give you more interesting poses anyway. Pause a sports broadcast or a dance video and draw the frozen frame - those poses are extreme, unrepeatable, and far better than anything a model holds for ten minutes. Photograph your own family or friends doing something physical. Draw people in a cafe, on the bus, or across the classroom, which is uncomfortable at first and then becomes the most valuable drawing habit you will ever build. Draw animals at the park; Aaron Blaise's video is about animals for a reason.

Set your own timer: thirty seconds for the first block, two minutes when you want to carry a gesture into construction.

Use one big canvas as a contact sheet rather than a new file per pose - twelve gestures in a grid, all visible at once, so you can see your own progress across a session instead of one drawing at a time. Set your brush deliberately too large for the size of the figure. On a 3000 pixel canvas, a 40 pixel brush drawing a figure 500 pixels tall makes detail physically impossible, which is exactly what you want during the thirty-second block.

Put each pose on its own layer if you plan to construct over it. Drop the gesture layer to about 30 percent and build boxes and cylinders on top the way you did in Lesson 9; the construction lands faster and looks less rigid than when you start cold. Bind brush size to a dial on your Artist 12 so you can go from a fat gesture mark to a thin construction line without breaking flow.

Finally, save the whole contact sheet even when the poses are bad. Twenty bad gestures a day for a month is a genuinely transformative amount of practice, and the file is the evidence.

PRACTICE · 30 MIN

1. Open the contact sheet file, or set up a 3000x2000 canvas with twelve marked cells.
2. Set your brush to about 40 pixels and turn stabilization down. Wobble is fine here.
3. Pick your reference source: pause a sports or dance video, or open your own photos.
4. Run twenty 30-second gestures. For each, draw the line of action first as one continuous stroke, then two or three rhythm lines. Stop when the timer stops, even mid-stroke.
5. Take a two-minute break and look at all twenty at once. Circle the three with the most energy.
6. Now run four 2-minute studies. Same start - line of action first - but this time add the major masses as simple shapes.
7. Take the best of those four, drop that layer to 30 percent, and construct over it with boxes and cylinders for another five minutes.
8. Flip the canvas horizontally and see whether the pose still reads.

Done when: Twenty-four gestures on one sheet, plus one constructed figure sitting on top of a gesture that is still visible underneath at low opacity.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.