21 Brilliant Tips to Practice Gesture Drawing

21. CSI:

While you practice your strokes to be relaxed and natural and not too sloppy, here is a format that you can follow for a better gesture drawing.

Ensure that most of your strokes are in the form of a C curve, S curve, or a straight line like an I.

How to Practice Gesture Drawing

I’m going to share some steps you can do for figure drawing practice.

With these steps, you’ll learn how to gesture draw and hopefully learn some additional gesture drawing tips.

This is the exact process I use to practice gesture drawing.

Below you’ll be able to watch process videos of the figure drawing sessions.

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How to Improve Gesture Drawing Step by Step

1. Use a Figure Drawing Tool

When you first start gesture drawing, you’ll need to build your knowledge of the human anatomy.

You don’t need to study all the names of body parts or muscles.

Looking at and studying the overall shapes of the body is more important.

That’s why I recommend using a pose reference site that displays different people in different poses at custom time intervals.

The site I recommend is this figure drawing tool.

You can also go to a life drawing class; however, sometimes you won’t get a good model in a class.

These figure drawing tools let you have more control over choosing really good poses.

2. Customize your Settings for the Best Gesture Drawing Practice

When you use a pose reference site for gesture drawing practice, you’ll see settings you can customize.

Almost all these types of sites are similar.

You’ll be able to choose if the models are nude or clothed, the gender of the models, and the time interval.

If you choose a time interval of fewer than 5 minutes then I recommend not trying to draw every little detail in the image.

When you choose a setting above 5 minutes, it allows you to work in more details and focus more on drawing shadows and lighting.

3. Figure Out Where the Line of Action is in the Pose

Getting your line of action down is the most important part of gesture drawing for beginners.

30 seconds is not a lot of time and you want to stay away from adding details.

Focus on simplifying the model’s pose into a visually appealing shape, and that starts with the line of action.

As you do more gesture drawing practice, you’ll want to draw shapes that are easy to read on paper.

When you finish drawing your pose, it helps to imagine your pose as an all-black silhouette.

If a stranger can understand what is going on by looking at the silhouette, then you have a great pose.

This time we’re going to focus on gesture drawing practice of a 3-minute pose.

With a few extra minutes, we can add a bit more detail, but we should still focus on drawing that line of action first.

A gesture drawing tip I’d suggest is to focus on drawing the overall big shapes of the person.

Something I wished I knew sooner is how important the harmony of the big shapes you draw is.

Your anatomy knowledge is important, but the shape design of your figure is equally as important.

Gesture Drawing Practice Process Video

Below is a gesture drawing practice video that shows every little step in how to improve gesture drawing.

This is a process video of the above 30-second drawing session.