tripna's sketchbook

[tripna]

Damn. Nice Sketches.
if you want to work on your values i would say really take time on one single painting and try to refine it to a "finish". Look out for masters on how they do values. take a master painting and desaturate it.

anyway I shouldn't be imposing stuff cos Its quite evident that you're already quite experienced in drawing and stuff.

a question though, do you draw from life often? where do you get the refs of figures? Can you share with us your thought process when doing gestures?

Thanks a lot man, I've been taking art seriously for 3 years now, but in the first 2 years of that I didnt really do a serious amount of work. Last 4-5 months was like the beginning of another era for me haha :D.

I did A LOT of life drawing for the first 3 months. Like, all I did was wake up, -gesture drawings-steve huston anatomy vids-anatomy studies-more gesture-anatomy practice-gesture again-longer figure studies etc. But what I forgot during that was to do imaginative stuff, for me thats always the fun part. I kind of burnt myself out. And if you dont do imaginative stuff right after you've studied, you may be wasting some of what you've learned. Because imagination stuff is where it all gets applied. Its the time when your brain completely wraps itself around the topic you're studying because it is a very hard thing to build a complicated object completely from imagination. But your brain gets very used to it and it becomes second nature. And actually visuals are your brain's one of stronger sides. We all have this amazing visual library and it's the single most important thing for an artist. I think there is another misconception about expanding your visual library that you have to do studies for it. Studies are great and they help a lot but I dont think that it true and if that was true, it would be nearly impossible to study everything in this world. What I think is more important than studies is, observation. And before I reached that "burn out" moment, I never realized that I don't actually observe anything. Nowadays when I go out everything catches my interest I just look and look and imagine it like "How would I draw this?" And do like mental sketches. I've watched a Kim Jung Gi interview where he explains how he built his incredible visual library, He says "I used to draw everything I remember I saw that day from my imagination, like the people I saw on the street, the character from the movie I saw etc." By doing this everyday (and for him, probably all day) he expanded his visual library like no one else before. This is taking  very long and I still havent explained my gesture approach lol. Sorry this took too long but I'm just trying to tell everything I know about this :D

For me, the gesture is the most important thing because without a nice gesture, any amount of immense anatomy knowledge and rendering wont do you any good. Gesture can be as simple as ONE line for a figure, but it usually gets more than that. So when I'm doing like a 1-2 min gesture pose, first thing I do is look at the figure and ask "What would be the best line to draw this figure?" Then I put on that line. That is fun way to think about it, "If you could put only one line right now, what would it be?" You put it down, then another etc. Something else which is very important is, your brain is your biggest enemy until you tame it. Because your brain always tries to organize, categorize and straighten stuff. Because unordered ryhtm and curves look very hard to manage for it. So look at any beginners figure drawings, everything is always VERY straight. As you do more and more gestures, you start to understand the curve, because curve is what gives the body it's fluid and watery design and it gives it life. Curves are very very important. I'd say in the beginning try to exaggerate the curves you see because you'll probably see them straighter than they actually are (I still exaggerate because it gives it much more feeling) I think, figure drawing is not an exercise where you try to copy exactly what you see, you see the figure, and re-build it by complimenting it's fluidity, it's incredible watery design. So when you're done, your gestures could be very very simple as a couple of LONG lines, or maybe if you did fast, you could add more structure. I dont push myself to add details etc, for a gesture and try to make it a "pretty picture" because that doesn't matter a bit for gestures. Btw, drawing long lines is very important too, you cant explain the fluidity of the body with short scratches. So try to relax and loosen up, dont care about how the drawing ends up, dont think about showing then to anyone, just draw looong curves and have fun. I can say gestures are like a meditation for me I almost zone out when I do them. Another suggestion would be buying a big sketchbook for gestures, I use an A3 sketchbook with very smooth-textureless paper, and I use a very soft oily pencil, something around 4B-6B. I like it when both the pencil and paper flows with me lol. Digital is always nice but I find it very hard to do long strokes from my shoulder with my bamboo, but if you have a large cintiq or intuos maybe it could work for you. But I'd always say it's a different ritual when done in pencil. I can suggest holding the pencil somewhat sideways so you wont start doing little scrathes. 

Phew, that's probably all I know about it, I learned %90 of my knowledge from Steve Huston's amazing videos in New Masters Academy. It is an incredible source, if you got 30 bucks to spare each month, I'd definately suggest it.
I usually find my refs from NewMaster's image library so I cant link to there. But I can find their gesture practice vids.

http://www.newmastersacademy.org/home/  (NMA website, everyone should check it out :D)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL..._xNA_kIs5w  (their gesture vids)
http://www.onairvideo.com/croquis-cafe-photos.html   (another great ref source)