Friday, July 24, 2015

Animal Gesture Drawings : July 23rd 2015

A major goal of mine is to squash any resistances I have toward drawing. Sometimes, I want to draw, but I'm reluctant to actually do it, because...drawing is hard? I'm allergic to emotion? I'll explode under all the self-inflicted pressure?? I will begin to feel that life is inevitably futile and sad??? Sure, sure, that all may be (just slightly) exaggerated, but - whatever the reasoning - sometimes I do avoid drawing, even when it feels like something I ought to do.

But in order to achieve some greater ambitions, such as drawing wildlife in the field that will never, ever stand still for you, being much better at drawing is a requirement. Speaking of wildlife again, drawing not just quickly, but precisely, would be my lofty goal.

I would like drawing to feel as natural and unimpeded as possible. I think if it ever truly feels easy I might feel like I'm doing something wrong. But natural, quick, sharp, automatic, with less doubt, less "I'm not sure what I'm doing; this is a jumbled mess I can't make sense of; I hate this drawing and everything it stands for", would indeed be nice.

Top left two: 30 second sketches (peahen, kiwi). Right side four: 1 minute sketches (macaw, sparrow, dove, duckling). Bottom left: 10 minute macaw.  Sort-of center: 5 minutes each for goose and seagull.
That's where gesture drawing comes in! Practice, practice, practice. Quick sketches, always with a set timer, and hopefully I'll get into the habit of doing these more often than just once every blue moon, because it's an important exercise for me. Building comfort with drawing, more confidence with skill, and more familiarity with anatomy, form, shape, shading, style. Trying to build myself a little no-pressure free-draw zone while still saying "Hey. Get good."

More 30 second birds surrounding a 5 minute horse, 5 minute squirrel, and 10 minute kangaroo. Yes the kangaroo was in a weird as heck position with strange perspective. It was not trying to be handsome or sensible like the other animals.
Helping a lot to make this practice easy is a neat figure and gesture drawing tool completely free on the internet: http://artists.pixelovely.com/. I love that they have animal drawing among the choices, and that you can customize the kinds of animals you want, focusing on birds, mammals, or anything from bunnies to tarantulas. I enjoy doing the "class style" program with a variance of sketch times.

Having a timer really helps cut back on the existential despair. Although there's still a lot of internal screaming and frustration words on those thirty second drawings, that's just part of the thrill. The joy of art, I should say.

My 30 second and 1 minute mammal sketches are not pictured here, because most are nigh-indiscernible and my brother made fun of them. Good exercises, not always pretty to look at it, not always something I'm gonna want to see again in ten years.

My brother did not make fun of this parrot, the way he made fun of the poor squiggle cats.
There's an awful lot of mental calculation that goes into drawing and it's only consistent practice over time that's going to improve that. You have to learn how to look, and what to look for, to construct your drawing, and how to do all the proper proportion checking and re-checking that will eventually become automatic. I still have to catch myself when I automatically draw a wing at the wrong angle, and that's just one example.

Five minutes was not enough time to draw that entire horse and all its legs. Not with my limited familiarity with entire horse and weird flailing leg anatomy.
Given that my ultimate goal is to draw things that move, well enough that I can capture things like personality, detailed body language, accurate identifiers, and behavior, the more automatic all the basic processes can be, the better. I want no hesitancy when it comes to putting pencil to paper.

No comments:

Post a Comment