Gesture Drawing Tips

in this video we're gonna talk about gesture drawing how you can take all of your complex anatomy and clothing and all the things that go into figures reduce them down to the simplest simplest forms and then reduce even further by loosening up and just quickly gesturally throwing down something that places your figure and gets a general movement and feel I'm David Finch and I'm a professional comic book artist if liked the video please hit like subscribe and hit the bell icon so I'm starting the video with a male and female figure drawn simply this is a method that I've developed it's from Loomis and then it's from how to draw comics tomorrow and then it's also just years of experience and trying different things and getting forms that connect together in a way that I like I will cover this more extensively in another video the purpose of this video though is how to use these figures in a very simple way very direct and very quick the form of gestural sketching so I'm gonna start my examples with just a random selection of figures what you really want to do is eliminate all of your Anatomy eliminate all of your detail your fingers and things that that slow your drawings down and work as quickly as possible and just blocking your basic forms just to get an expression of a figure and so you want to hold your pencil very loosely just relax your hand it's very easy to start pressing and scribbling really tightly and trying to get something tight and to want to have a finished picture right away but the point of this is to have a very very simple construction that not only is easy to edit and easy to change but it's also going to be much more loose and fluid because you are just throwing the line and and not really worrying about getting something that's absolutely perfect and so now I'm going to draw a female figure it's something I find that really works is if you have the shoulders pointing in angled in one direction you angle the pelvis the other direction and it gives the body a lot of curvature movement again this is another topic that I'd like to cover more extensively in another video not only flowlines your figures and how they can give you your figures a lot more of an interesting rhythmic feel but also how to use force in your figures and how to take advantage of gravity and had a direct force through your figure now I'm gonna draw somebody sitting down I'm gonna change up the angle so you're looking down at them and for this one I'm not wrong in I'm really doing this I'm just eyeballing it but it's all very very simple shapes that I'm just connecting together the more comfortable you get with these shapes the more comfortable you get with just the simple tubes for arms and and simple tubes for legs more of a boxy kind of a sphere ish thing for a head and a barrel shape for a chest the more you can just turn those in space the easier these kinds of figures will be and really the more you do these kinds of figures the easier it will be for you to turn them in space and that's the entire point of doing this it's it's actually not only to build up a mental catalog of poses and positions for your figures but it's also to develop a mental catalog of the way the figures move so here's somebody running away this is looking at somebody from behind and this is just a quick quick gestural sketch it's got no no identifying detail at all but the whole point of it is just to get a quick statement and I'm using all the the same basic shapes that I use everywhere you'll notice though that these shapes are simplified from the first images that I showed at the beginning of this video importantly I'm just keeping it as loose as possible I'm really not overthinking any one line or any one shape it's so easy for me to make adjustments and I'm also allowing myself to scribble and you'll notice as you watch these the more I struggle and there are places where I'm really confident with my line here and it just flows and then they're places like you can see on this leg that I'm drawing right now I'm not really not as confident and so it ends up being a bit of a darker scribble but it's a place for me to be able to kind of work out those those issues without worrying about folds or Anatomy or or lighting or any of those things I want this to be as quick as simple as possible also because these figures are drawn so quickly it means that it's very easy for me to put multiple figures into a scene together to arrange them and compose them without having to use a program like clip studio or something and and try and resize and manipulate them I can just very very quickly draw and erase detail and it's it doesn't matter if I have to erase an entire figure because what I'm drawing here is so quick and simple that it's it's really very disposable here I'm going to draw a figure punching I think this is a figure I've drawn in a comic a million times I'm sure and so I'm really just kind of coming up with stuff off the top of my head just throw in here the kinds of figures that I run into drawing comics you really never know when you get a script the kind of thing that will be asked for and you need to be able to draw efficiently as possible everything that the writer asked for and now it's possible to get reference for for everything but that's a very very tedious way of trying to work and you also will never have the kind of fluidity and spontaneity with a reference figure then you'll get from something that you just sketched quickly from your head and the faster more proficient you get at this the more effective you'll be now obviously after this stage you want to light this down and get in all your Anatomy and try your best in getting all that detail to not lose the energy that you put into these but the more energy you can get with these quick simple sketches the better your art will be so it's important to know that there is a way of studying these sorts of figures and incorporating it into your work what I recommend when you are starting out you devote a substantial amount of time every day to just drawing these quick gestural sketches so in a day that you're you're learning how to draw you might be working on legs and working on an Anatomy or you might be working on perspective or whatever it is that you're really studying but devote a portion of your day to just filling a page with these kinds of sketches think that the only difference between an artist is very dynamic and fluid versus an artist that can be a little bit stiff is just going through this process and just relaxing and just throwing out lines now I think probably the most important tip that I have is what to look at you need to be able to do these kinds of sketches from your imagination and that's a goal that you need to get to and I think it's something you need to practice at all times from the start if you want these to become part of your own mental library you need to just be creating them off the cup that's what will really sink in but in order to improve these you need to find sources and I would recommend that you look at light look at people is sitting in the restaurant or in the subway or walking down the street and just do really quick sketches of them you see people doing this in parks and this is why they do it it's an incredibly effective way of getting comfortable with the figure because we are doing more action-oriented comics I also highly recommend that you look at other comic books there's there's a hundred years of thousands of incredible artists it's countless and I could go on all day listing all of my favorite artists you know Joe Madden is a great example of an artist that just knows how to push a figure to its absolute limits and he does that every time and it creates something that is just stunning Frank Frazetta is another great artist to look at Mike Leake nola and I've got my whole list of favorites and I'm sure that you have yours and what I recommend that you do is you go through comics and you just draw from those books draw as many figures as you can to fill a page and do it every day and then find another artist and do it and don't just use one artist because all of us every every comic artist every development artist we all have a way of working that gets a little bit ingrained over time and you want to be able to broaden your knowledge as much as possible and take advantage of all the work that's been done for so many years by so many artists all right so now that we've drawn a bunch of figures just randomly on the page just loosening up and trying some different poses I want to take what we've done and put it into practice and we're gonna draw a cover layout so I'm gonna start with with Wolverine he's in the foreground it's generally number one I tend to put my favorite carrot in the foreground of a shot you know and I also start with the foreground because it's easier for me to add figures behind other figures and lay them in that way than it is for me to have to erase out and put figures in the foreground which I mean it happens it just really depends on how a shot goes but I tend to do a lot of these kind of really really quickly outs I try not to turn a whole lot of these into editorial because I know which one I like and I find if you give too many choices you end up drawing cover you don't like but just on my own kind of behind the scenes I draw quite a few of these until I have something that I feel like really fits together and in each one I don't just randomly throw in figures and say hey if it works great and if it didn't work I'll just try another one I do put a quite a bit of work into trying to make each one of them fit together as well as possible it's very easy for me to do that because the figures are so simple it's so quickly drawn so I want to stay as loose and gestural with these as I possibly can I'm just scribbling sometimes I'll draw those I'll draw those shapes I'll draw the bottom of the chest shape and I'll draw in more complete forms if I feel like I'm meeting it because I'm not seeing the shape and other times it'll get really really simple and quick and it just depends on on the needs of what I'm trying to see for the figure so I've got maybe this week Jean Grae or storm and I've drawn her in behind Wolverine and it's really easy for me to size or in the way that I want and make it all fit together like a little piece and here's another piece of my puzzle I don't like how I'm drawing I'm starting to actually draw him a little bit a hunched over almost like Wolverine was and I don't want a mirror that I wanted to stand up straight and look up at it so it gives it a little bit of a contrast from the figure below it and there he is very easy for me to place a man I make sure he's just slightly smaller than my Jean Grae or my my storm and I'm gonna add another figure here and I'm just finding a space where other figures aren't and and just filling out my composition I really want to make sure I don't have any gaping holes and make sure that they all kind of connect back together in a way that looks pleasing you so I'm actually talking I'm not drawing and talking at the same time I'm recording this afterwards and in case it's not obvious but I've got his leg there now lifted the same way that I've got the figure above him lifted and so they're they're much too close to each other and I would never leave that it's making me actually want to go back and fix that even for the purposes of this even though this is just an example I have now I've got some dead space over on the other side but I'm starting to get a little bit more limited in my space so I'm gonna use a flying character and that's a good place to pop them out of the picture I want to make sure that there are all of their joints everybody's joints their hands elbows ideally are are showing and are not obscured so I wouldn't want one person's hand to overlap another person's hand that's that can start to look a little awkward now you I'm gonna throw in a big huge John Kerr I have no idea who this would be it really doesn't matter but I just thought you know just for some contrast and because I'm making this up I don't even know who these characters are for the most part I I drew Avengers for a while quite a while ago now and there was giant man and I'd loved them because I could just drop them in the back of a composition but not only did he cover all the backgrounds that wasn't having to draw a million buildings that was nice but also just compositionally I'd love the contrast of this massive think you're behind my my team and so there you go I've got them all kind of interlocked and connected very easy for me to do that because I'm really thinking about how everything works together instead of trying to think about how that ham looks or how that leg looks or any of that and because I've drawn so many of these little simple figures I can actually make those those simple figures even without any kind of thought at all work well enough to actually be a basis for something that I can complete so now I'm gonna take the same technique I just wanted to draw a couple of hands really quickly just to show that the same way of drawing a whole figure works works for hands and I highly highly recommend that you go through comics of artists that you think draw really great gestural hands and and just do this fill pages of this stuff because of all things hands are an almost entirely different object to draw depending on the pose of the the angle that you see them at so they really require you develop a whole visual library adjust just for them and it's something that's really worth devoting a lot of time to and it could be incredibly relaxing once you start getting comfortable with them it's just it's fun to draw them you I'm just gonna draw another hand to see I guess the opposing hand another thing that I really recommend the old Disney artists were were incredible obviously and there are some character sheets of hands from the 50s 60s some of the the movies that they they did at the time and you've got you're just drawn really gestural cool hands and I really recommend you look it up and and give it a shot so now the final point I want to quickly cover the importance of trying to approximate your finished picture in your your gesture getting actual Anatomy is not what you're after but what you do want to do is is use this as a chance to internalize shapes to the extent that they come out almost like handwriting now this isn't any kind of a finished arm or any kind of a finished leg and it requires some adjustments but this is what's coming out of my head without putting any thought into it at all it really is like writing my name and that's what comes from repetition you just do this over and over and just observe as you do it and this gets natural foreshortening is is a subject that we're gonna talk about quite a bit and some upcoming videos but just quickly I want to show you how easy it is to draw very simple foreshortening on a figure when you're doing it this quickly in this this loosely you can block in your shapes and see if it's gonna work and if it all holds together without drawing something so complete and now I'm gonna draw an arm projecting out towards you the forearms gonna be obviously longer than the upper arm and they all overlap it over each other and the hands gonna be larger and project out further than the the forearm in a lot of ways it really good for shortening that has some drama to it is is like using a special lens on a camera I'm not familiar enough with the cameras its wide-angle or I don't know but you get a bit of an extreme perspective so it really pushes the foreground and background and that's what you're looking for for comic book perspective certainly because you want that drama you wanted to project right out into your face you know Jack Kirby style that's his innovation among many and among the characters he created but my favorite thing about Jack Kirby really was was his use of foreshortening suggest punch her right in the face on a comic page and it revolutionized I think how things were were drawn now I'm just drawing in some really really quick simple perspective lines I'm gonna draw a figure in perspective so you're looking up at them and I think it's really important to practice your figures this way and draw a perspective and then draw them in this is effectively drawing them in an environment I I know exactly what my ankle is the way that I'm looking at them and just drawing figures just on the page if you're sketching just floating the limitation of that is once you have a room or a rooftop or some kind of a scene in a comic it can be a little daunting like you know how do you get them to fit and make them look like they are part of your environment and the way that you do that is when you're sketching and you'll find a ton of comics or magazines or life whatever it is draw things to look like they are part of an environment draw some really simple just sketch perspective and make sure that your figures line up with it now last thing I'm gonna do is just quickly take everything that I've learned I'm just making this figure up I don't really even know what the pose is I'm just kind of drawing I know that I'm drawing him facing the way this is sometimes for me a relaxing experiment and that's just I just start moving I think of a general angle that I'm seeing the figure from and then I just want to find a way to make it make it visually interesting and I'm using all of the techniques that I've learned through all these other figures so I'm really not totally rudderless and making this up for nothing I've gotten his weight balanced on his front bent leg and you can see that he's putting weight on that leg and I've got him projecting his force up from his rear leg that's pushing off from the ground below and it's pushing up you can see there's a line going all the way up through his body from the tip of his toe up to the top of his head and that's pushing up through I can also see that his his front leg the angle is off so I'm gonna fix that quickly and this is a great thing about drawing the the closer you can get in a really really simple gestural way to your final figure the more you'll see the kinds of problems you're gonna have with that figure going forward and you get that done in a minute instead of investing hours into a figure and then thinking oh it's really not looking how I intended it to look so adjusting the angle the hips there and I solve that problem and this is just it's a gesture but this is something that I can build my figure on top of it's it's part of a scene and I need to be able to put scenes together quickly and easily of people running up the stairs or sitting in an office or ordering takeout or hailing a taxi I can't possibly meet a deadline if I'm having to find reference for all of those things every single time all right thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: David Finch

Views: 329,379

Rating: 4.9810524 out of 5

Keywords: drawing tutorial, how to draw, comic art, inking, david finch, gesture drawing

Id: GNfe_ypQG9w

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020