Doctor_Fruitbat fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Nov 16, 2018

• Gesture: Trying to capture a good gesture is critical for a good finished piece. I think this is where a lot of people who are new to art get stuck, because it's such a weird, nebulous concept. It's a rhythm that you only notice when it's absent, and its absence can turn even the best piece of draftsmanship into a dull rock. I start off with a fixed point (the head) and work from there, thinking about the relationship of the curves and angles. In this piece, I started with the head, found a basic line of the shoulders, found a curvature of the chest, and then used the bottom of that curve to create an angle into the legs. The important thing when drawing human gesture is to think about the alternating forms of the body: when one muscle flexes, its antagonist contracts; when one side squashes, the other side stretches. You can see this especially in the arms, where the curve of the deltoid follows into the curve of the tricep which follows into the curve of the bicep, creating a kind of stairstep or flow. This is where I'm least concerned about proportion or three-dimensionality; if the gesture is good, those two will naturally follow.
  
• Blocking: If I think the gesture looks good (or, in the case of a relatively quick piece like this, good enough), I'll start trying to better define the contour and three-dimensionality of the figure. I use simple, straight lines and hard angles, since this helps me to visualize plane changes better and helps me to determine overlaps that I can use to describe the physical structure of the figure in space. This is also a good place to catch proportion mistakes, inaccuracies, or an overly-stiff gesture. The gesture will naturally harden once you start turning it into proper forms, so doing this basic "blocking" helps me to figure out if my gesture needed to be looser. In the case of this gesture, I figured out several proportion mistakes (head, arm length), and figured out where I needed to improve the gesture (mainly the deltoids in order to create a smoother flow).
  
• Firming: Using the blocking stage as a guide, I start to better define the figure. If I'm not drawing from reference, I'll usually redo the blocking and/or gesture phase if I find issues during the blocking stage. In a case like this, since I'm drawing from reference, I feel more confident in simply correcting mistakes in the firming stage. This is where I start adding in anatomical features, creating smoother curves to replace some of the harder angles, and generally checking proportions and perspective to try and ensure it looks correct. In longer pieces, I'll usually spend a significant amount of time in this stage, checking and re-checking the features until I'm confident in what I've drawn. This is usually where a solid grasp of anatomy comes in most handy, but you can often get away with lackluster anatomical knowledge if your gesture is good enough. Unless we're looking up close at a highly detailed back or something similar, we tend to look more for the curves of the body, rather than individual muscles.
  

Vermain fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Nov 21, 2018