05-28-2016, 06:03 PM
Gosh, the world of art teaching is a messy thing... Below be controversial opinions.
Something that I've seen in nearly every sketchbook is people trying to learn anatomy gestures like they are a fundamental building block, and totally ignoring the studies that are going to help them improve.
Rhythm, gesture, composition, colour appeal, emotion are all the results of fundamentals. They are nothing more than labels and categorizations of the results. They are an abstraction of the world.
Things exist in this world without any quantifiable level of rhythm, And drawing it as such is not a mistake.
Actual fundamentals are physical things and skills that you can strip back until you can explain it without any other fundamental. Of course, the terms are a bit nebulous, and if this weren't such an issue with artist progress, then I would just dismiss this as silly semantics and move on.
Light, Perspective, Proportion, these are real fundamentals.
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Over the course of the last century, you can map out a general trajectory of how anatomy textbooks have changed.
A rough timeline being Bridgman>Loomis>Rielly>Hogarth>Hampton, and one thing you will notice is that as each generation tried to improve on the last, they made a general move to abstract the forms even more than their predecessor to add something meaningful to the pile. But I'm not sure that anyone stood back and asked why greater levels of abstraction are superior, having been watching students try and learn on forums for a decade, I have to conclude that you can't just learn the abstraction and expect it to work.
Gestures in their most pure form were meant to be the starting stages of a drawing, which you could take the whole way to being an illustration. They are distilling things you know about the human body to as few marks as possible so you can quickly evaluate poses, and make ideas. They are a shorthand for years of studying the actual body.
![[Image: IV7pwh.jpg]](https://snag.gy/IV7pwh.jpg)
Drawings like this only come when you know where all the bones are, and understand the forms you are trying to represent. And although I don't discount the possibility of making so many gestures of feet that you can pick it up, it is by far a slow and inconsistent method that I can't recommend. Once you learn the forms, fret not young padawan, learning how to pose it so it looks nice isn't so hard.
So I'll say it again, if you can't draw box perfectly, how in Odin's name do you expect to draw a human.
If you can't draw it. You don't understand the form, or even worse, you don't even know how to draw form.
p.s, Loomis doesn't even mention gesture, until after explaining perspective and proportion, and even then the mannequin he gives is concrete, not random scribbles.
Something that I've seen in nearly every sketchbook is people trying to learn anatomy gestures like they are a fundamental building block, and totally ignoring the studies that are going to help them improve.
Rhythm, gesture, composition, colour appeal, emotion are all the results of fundamentals. They are nothing more than labels and categorizations of the results. They are an abstraction of the world.
Things exist in this world without any quantifiable level of rhythm, And drawing it as such is not a mistake.
Actual fundamentals are physical things and skills that you can strip back until you can explain it without any other fundamental. Of course, the terms are a bit nebulous, and if this weren't such an issue with artist progress, then I would just dismiss this as silly semantics and move on.
Light, Perspective, Proportion, these are real fundamentals.
-------------------------------
Over the course of the last century, you can map out a general trajectory of how anatomy textbooks have changed.
A rough timeline being Bridgman>Loomis>Rielly>Hogarth>Hampton, and one thing you will notice is that as each generation tried to improve on the last, they made a general move to abstract the forms even more than their predecessor to add something meaningful to the pile. But I'm not sure that anyone stood back and asked why greater levels of abstraction are superior, having been watching students try and learn on forums for a decade, I have to conclude that you can't just learn the abstraction and expect it to work.
Gestures in their most pure form were meant to be the starting stages of a drawing, which you could take the whole way to being an illustration. They are distilling things you know about the human body to as few marks as possible so you can quickly evaluate poses, and make ideas. They are a shorthand for years of studying the actual body.
Drawings like this only come when you know where all the bones are, and understand the forms you are trying to represent. And although I don't discount the possibility of making so many gestures of feet that you can pick it up, it is by far a slow and inconsistent method that I can't recommend. Once you learn the forms, fret not young padawan, learning how to pose it so it looks nice isn't so hard.
So I'll say it again, if you can't draw box perfectly, how in Odin's name do you expect to draw a human.
If you can't draw it. You don't understand the form, or even worse, you don't even know how to draw form.
p.s, Loomis doesn't even mention gesture, until after explaining perspective and proportion, and even then the mannequin he gives is concrete, not random scribbles.
Drawing out of perspective is like singing out of tune. I'll throw a shoe at you if you do it.
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