009 Gestures

As some  might know, a gesture drawing is a quick study ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. It is mostly  used in studying the human form.
You try to capture the essence, flow and rhythym of the pose without going into details. I have known this method for a long time, but only recently, I started to regularly make gesture drawings. And this really helps a lot, as you learn to quickly see the form and flow.

Here and here are links to some gesture drawing tools, which change pictures after a set amount of time.
I mostly use the second one as it also has models without skin (only 3D models, no humans were harmed in making them), so you can use it for anatomy observations as well. And it has camera angles that wouldn´t be so easy to do with  a real model.
The first link has photos of real people also with clothes, which is a different sort of gesture drawing, because the clothes sometimes change the form.

Here are some examples from the last 2 weeks (there are also some studies that took longer...and some doodles):

Gestures and some studies

As you can see, the drawings do not have to be perfectly beautiful pictures with perfect proportions and rendering etc., the main goal is to get a feel for poses and the flow of the human body in motion.

I try to do a couple of these gestures every day, because they are fast to do and you learn a lot. I can highly recommend this to anyone, who wants to learn how to draw the human figure.

008 Speedpainting and the Revenge of the Stressful Timer

Last weekend I attended a live speedpainting event hosted by a deviantArt group. I managed to participate for a few hours and it basically goes like this: you get a theme and you have 30 minutes to come up with a concept for it. It was the second time I took part and I can really tell you, I learned something. Not essentially about painting itself, but how your mind influences your work.
I have already done speedpaintings before, whether from my mind or with reference (these are more studies than speedpaintings), but painting with a set amount of time for yourself or painting with a given amount by others are two completely different things. Stress and adrenaline start to rush, when the timer starts to tick time away, nearing the inevitable 0:00. It´s kind of like taking an exam :)
The first time I participated, my mind was too distracted by that and I even changed my paintings and started all over again after half of the time finished. This was the awful result:

Speedpainting theme: insect predatory creature

 I usually do not start out a painting with much structure and it doesn´t matter how long this phase takes. But within a time limit of 30 minutes, you have to have some kind of structure and organization.
So this time I focused and ignored the timer in my head and tried to bring in some structure. Starting from overall messy general idea to a somewhat nice painting. Results this time where, at least for me, much better:

Theme here: Futuristic SMG

A somewhat exhausting, but very fun task this time was painting for 2 hours straight and finishing 4 speedpaintings:

Themes: Mythological creature, sadistic villain, forest hut and subtle fairy

While the concepts themselves are not very original, I´m quite satisfied, because the event taught me something about time management and structure. Something that also is a vital component in learning how to draw and paint. Time leads to more images, more images lead to more practise and more practise leads to better images.