Day 11. Sweet Little Gestures
A few loose lines can say so much
Hello, my wonderful creative crew.
A quick note from the heart: There is a lot of hard stuff happening in the world right now. Some of it is far away, some right outside our door. It can feel overwhelming. I feel overwhelmed sometimes. And I want to acknowledge this fact for all of us and for myself. At the same time, by shining a light, and keeping our eyes trained to see the light - strangers see one another, which makes us able to jump in and help each other.
Ultimately, this is what we are doing here: we are using drawing to connect. It feels extra meaningful to be in a creative conversation with you right now. Thank you for being here and showing up daily with your big, brave hearts. This really is DrawTogether in every sense of the word. And I’m grateful for it. And for you. ❤️
Okay. Onwards.
Today is short and sweet and fun and loose. Just what we need right now.
Yesterday, we began our journey to SEE by looking closely and creating blind contour drawings. We slowly traced the edges of an object with our eyes and asked our pens to follow. (The results are wonderful and hilarious, and you can see hundreds - nearly 1,000 - of them in the GUT community chat.)
Today, we are practicing looking and line drawing more. But instead of focusing on detail, we will draw in the most energetic, simplest way possible.
Gesture Drawings
A gesture drawing is a loose, simple line drawing that captures form, structure and movement. We often use this technique in figure drawing, especially to warm up at the beginning of a session. But we can make a gesture drawing of anything.
Gesture drawing is a great way to begin learning to articulate shapes and proportions and capture a subject’s essence without including all the details. It’s part line drawing like you made in yesterday’s Blind Contour lesson, part Ellsworth Kelly/simple shape lesson.
Gesture drawing is simple - but as we all know, it’s often harder to do less than to do more. (Kind of like me trying to keep my lessons short! LOL.) But doing less is worth the effort. When we can capture a subject in a few simple lines, it means we’ve really looked closely at our subject, and we’ve paid close attention to its line and form. It also means we are embracing “good enough” instead of “getting it right.”
So today, we’re doing some loose, light gesture drawings. AND I am going to make it even more exciting by giving us a fun constraint that nearly guarantees you end up with some really cool drawings.
I think we could all use a little feel-good fun exercise right now. So let’s do this.