Gesture is One Third the Battle

   Now I ain't been using the blog entirely as effectively as I could be. We got told pretty early on that besides blog tasks and the documentation of various aspects of our work, that we should use it as an expression of our creative identities. What makes us tick so to speak. Now there's a thousand things I could talk about but I think I've finally come across something that I actually want to share.

 It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I really enjoy our weekly life drawing sessions, hell just drawing the figure in general is a nice treat. There's a tonne of techniques that come into these lessons but I'm going to get into gesture drawings for the time being. Gesture drawings are a great way of telling if someone has a good knowledge of most aspects of figure drawings. You have to get all the rhythm down in an incredibly limited amount of time and with minimal but entirely effective mark making. When done well gesture drawings are immense pieces of work in their own right, it's almost musical, bringing to mind the blues masters who started to bare their soul with three chords and a guitar with four broken strings. When you can get that quality with what seems to the ignorant eye to be a monumental level of simplicity you've pretty much cracked it. Which is difficult for me as a progressive metal head to say. I'm usually all about the technical.

 Can get round to showing you what I wanted to now anyway. I found this animator called Ryan Woodward while I was having a raz round for some gesture drawing exercises. On the side he does a body of work called Conte Animated. Which as the name suggests are gesture drawings completed with conte sticks. You know what you can just have a look see.

  How cool are those? It's a hypothetical question I suppose but I can't get enough of them. For sure a technique I want to try for myself. I mean I'm sure there are other artists that approach their gestures in a similar way but I just love the sense of form he managed to get with the blocks of tone that he throws in. Just badass. Even took some of these gestures and made an animation out of them. I'll throw that below along with a link to his two websites. Check it out you won't be sorry.

http://ryanwoodwardart.com/

http://conteanimated.com/