How do you do your gesture practice?

[JyonnyNovice]

Hi daggers! I've been trying to find ways to make my gesture practice more smooth - quickposes.com and pixelovely are great but if I have images of my own (like Proko's life model packs) I have to set a timer on my phone and change the picture every 30 sec / 1min / whatever. It kinda breaks the flow when the beeping goes off, and I have to reset the alarm and change the picture.

In Windows XP I believe you could edit the registry for the photo viewer and enter a custom interval for the slideshow mode, but I've poked around in Windows 7 registry and haven't found the imageviewer settings (one googled forum post says you can't change it).

So I googled around for other image viewers that might have this feature and haven't had any luck.

So... does anyone know of any program where you can set a manual timing on image slideshow? I thought it'd be a common feature but it seems not!

Have a great and creative day : )

EDIT

I found this program, XnView, that lets you set whatever interval you want when playing an image slideshow. Hope that's useful for someone else too!



I'm still really interested to hear how people approach their gesture drawings - what kind of medium do you prefer? What kind of paper? What size? Do you feel limited at all doing them digitally? Please share!

As for me, I've been really enjoying doing them with charcoal pencil on smooth newsprint; being able to do very light to very dark with broad or precise lines in one pencil is really nice.

[clockodile]

I do gestures as part of my morning warm up, every day. On top of that I also do different things when I feel like studying them, focusing on sports, action, exaggeration or whatever I feel the need to bone up on. As a side note, I learnt to do gesture drawing from the Force book (by Mattesi).

Daily studies are usually just done from posemaniacs, pixelovely, and formerly quickposes (I avoid this site now due to the partial bodies, and generally poor reference quality present since it allowed submissions). I grab a biro and some copy paper, and just do two sides of 30 second poses. I mainly do them to loosen up and just switch my brain into drawing mode. Sometimes I do 10 second poses as well, to practise my speed and get into the pace I need to grab gestures from life. (People on the street and such.)

However, this is sort of something that I built up to. 2-3 years ago when I was starting to get serious, I typically did 90 or 60 second poses because I wasn't nearly as fast, and it became a daily thing. (The reason behind this is actually because I was dealing on and off with various health issues, and the poses became the 'at least I got SOMETHING done today' thing I did to stay motivated and in the game when I had an otherwise shitty, unproductive day.) So now I probably have hundreds, if not a couple of thousand, sheets of gestures in the ringbinders I sort my sketches into.

When I do actual studies, I often spend longer on poses (anything from a couple of mins to ten), and use various media, though I am still usually working on copy paper because I draw a lot, and it is cheap. So far my personal favourite tool is china markers, because they respond well to pressure and like charcoal, can go from pretty light to extremely dark. They don't smear, which is why I prefer them to charcoal for this. I like to study different stuff for this, like sports, animals, clothed figures, etc. Other tools I like are sharpie pens, the pentel brush pen, solid graphite pencils like Progressos (usually pretty soft - 6B), and fineliners.

Size varies depending on time. Quick ones, under a minute, are about 8-10 poses to an A4 sheet, but 5 minute ones are more like 3-5 to a sheet. If I am out drawing gestures from real life people in the street, etc. they're very quick and small - maybe about 5 - 10 to an A5 sheet. So about half the size.

I think that is pretty much how I do poses/gestures. Sorry for the long answer!

I have heard good things about XnView, though I have not used it. I use Ifranview, which also has a primitive slideshow function hidden in its options. Honestly it is just a program I have used for years as an imageviewer on slow running computers and stuck with - it is very functional but very basic.

[JyonnyNovice]

No need to apologise for a long answer; you took time and care to write it we can't bemoan the short time it takes to read it!

Thanks for all the information too; china markers eh? I hadn't heard of them! Gonna look into them as they sound my kind of thing.

I totally empathise with you too, with my little two year old running around sometimes gestures is all I get to do, I just leave my pens and paper ready with the slideshow running and whenever I get a few minutes of peace I do a few gestures. As a result I've totally fallen in love with them and really wanna push this skill and make gestures that capture the pose but are beautiful to look at too. I recently bought Ryan Woodward's book "Gesture's Volume 3" which is a real inspiration. I guess I aspire to do stuff like that. (Plus I think my 'drawing stamina' is pretty low, being able to create something beautiful in 10 - 15 minutes max is a great prospect for me).

If you haven't seen his animation, check out Thought of you - it moved me to tears the first time I watched it.

[clockodile]

China markers (they seem to be called grease pencils sometimes) are these ultra waxy pencils that are meant to be used to write on china/glass. They're a bit fragile and hard to sharpen, but fun to sketch with. The permanence is useful too, because it forces the user to pause and consider the line. It appears they're popular with animators too.

Wow, learning whilst juggling a small child is an impressive task - and you seem to get a lot done. I like that tactic of making it super convenient by running the the slideshow. Also, at least in my experience and watching others, drawing stamina seems to build naturally over time with persistence.

That animation is gorgeous. Really perfect marriage of shape and buttery-smooth movement. I'd seen Ryan Woodward's gestures about the net (they seem to come up on google a lot) and they are fantastic, but it amazing to see them in action.

[Ursula Dorada]

Wolken made a nice tool for that, that you won't mess up if you touch the mouse and has a pause button :) It's awesome. http://wolkenfels.deviantart.com/art/Ima...-412103775

Just want to drop this link in here <3
And whoa, taking care of a small child is no small task. I applaud your stamina :)

[JyonnyNovice]

Thanks guys, it can be a struggle, I force myself to draw whenever I'm home and she's sleeping - a lot of times I don't want to at first but 10 minutes in and I get the rhythm. Trying to cram as much in as I can in these days cause her grandparents are here taking off most of the load, plus I've got a month off work! Here's to a summer filled with drawing!

Thanks for the link, I'll try it out!

Would love to hear from anyone else about gestures and such ^^