08-20-2015, 10:20 PM
I agree Hampton isnt the best for learning gestures. He uses too many scratchy lines which creates bad draftsmenship habits in my opinion. As well as what you said about the exaggeration. I think using exaggeration is fine but most beginners dont have things like proportions and perspective drilled into their heads enough. So when they try to exaggerate its already coming from a distorted understanding of the figure. So Hampton's book is good as a beginner artistic anatomy book but I'd skip copying his gesture style.
Im not an animator but I really found this book useful. Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael Mattesi. It took me a while to really understand gestures honestly. This book talks about gesture in a some what abstract way that may be confusing to some at first. Like you said gesture is problem solving so it makes sense to teach it in this way. What he teaches is how to feel the rhythm of a pose so that you can solve the unique problem each pose presents. Theres no formula that will work for every pose.
Other influences on me for gesture is Proko and Jeff Watt's approach to gesture. They use a more graphical approach than Hampton or Michael Mattesi. They really focus on gesture as a design and exclude any perspective or anatomy during that phase of the drawing. They're not animators so this makes more sense I think for their purposes.
To me gesture is all about designing the pose but with a core understanding of perspective, proportions and anatomy. Exaggeration with a solid foundation of those 3 things allows you to make informed decisions about the over all rhythms. You think about the action the person is doing and what rhythm lines to emphasis in order to convey that action most effectively.
I have to disagree about visualization though. I do see images in my head and so do you. You see them every night when you're asleep. They're called dreams :P The mind does work that way. You might just be forcing it too much. I saw an interview that Frank Frazetta described drawing as projecting an image in his mind onto the page and then just tracing it. Kim Jung Gi says he sees about 70% of what hes going to draw before he draws anything. Now that might not be best described as "seeing an image" but its definitely a real experience. I've had detailed images flash in my minds eye though plenty of times.
I might be going off on a tangent here... Theres a phenomenon call hypnagogic imagery in which during the process of falling asleep you will "see" images. Whats actually happening is your subconscious is implanting the fabricated memory of an image as though you saw it several seconds before. I think the memory of images can be created in the mind while awake. Just close your eyes while looking at something and notice how the visual memory of what you were looking at is there and then fades. Artists like Kim Jung Gi have strengthened their visual memory so that they can access a library of mental reference that they can manipulate at will to work from. Just my little theory :)
Im not an animator but I really found this book useful. Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael Mattesi. It took me a while to really understand gestures honestly. This book talks about gesture in a some what abstract way that may be confusing to some at first. Like you said gesture is problem solving so it makes sense to teach it in this way. What he teaches is how to feel the rhythm of a pose so that you can solve the unique problem each pose presents. Theres no formula that will work for every pose.
Other influences on me for gesture is Proko and Jeff Watt's approach to gesture. They use a more graphical approach than Hampton or Michael Mattesi. They really focus on gesture as a design and exclude any perspective or anatomy during that phase of the drawing. They're not animators so this makes more sense I think for their purposes.
To me gesture is all about designing the pose but with a core understanding of perspective, proportions and anatomy. Exaggeration with a solid foundation of those 3 things allows you to make informed decisions about the over all rhythms. You think about the action the person is doing and what rhythm lines to emphasis in order to convey that action most effectively.
I have to disagree about visualization though. I do see images in my head and so do you. You see them every night when you're asleep. They're called dreams :P The mind does work that way. You might just be forcing it too much. I saw an interview that Frank Frazetta described drawing as projecting an image in his mind onto the page and then just tracing it. Kim Jung Gi says he sees about 70% of what hes going to draw before he draws anything. Now that might not be best described as "seeing an image" but its definitely a real experience. I've had detailed images flash in my minds eye though plenty of times.
I might be going off on a tangent here... Theres a phenomenon call hypnagogic imagery in which during the process of falling asleep you will "see" images. Whats actually happening is your subconscious is implanting the fabricated memory of an image as though you saw it several seconds before. I think the memory of images can be created in the mind while awake. Just close your eyes while looking at something and notice how the visual memory of what you were looking at is there and then fades. Artists like Kim Jung Gi have strengthened their visual memory so that they can access a library of mental reference that they can manipulate at will to work from. Just my little theory :)