 Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and this video is one that I'm releasing from my Patreon page. My patrons get extra content and this was a video that I created a while back on Gesture sketching and I thought it would be a great lesson Because this month's theme in Monet Café is figures in a landscape So I hope you enjoy this lesson released from my Patreon page Please like this video subscribe to this channel and hit that bell icon to get notified of future videos And also a quick shout-out to my actual patrons They're the ones with their $5 a month support contribution that keep these free videos coming to people literally all over the world God bless you patrons. If you'd like to become a patron you can do so at patreon.com Slash Susan Jenkins. Hello patrons and welcome to this week's homework assignment Which is gesture sketching or gesture drawing. I'm going to explain a little bit about it and give you the details Now the definition of gesture drawing is drawings that are done very quickly and are meant to show movement Or the position of a figure. These are for planning purposes and not meant to be finished artworks Now in our case, we're not really in a planning purpose But the point of this is to develop your ability to create a lively Stroke to your artwork. Have you ever seen painters that just do that? Their strokes just seem so full of life and This can be accomplished by doing lots of these little gesture drawings And it doesn't have to be with a human form as I will explain in a minute Following are some examples of gesture drawing some done with the human hand. You can do this with a little animal Reference images if you have them you can do this with a Interesting kind of scribbly style. So the sky is the limit And if you do choose to use the human form the point is to capture that gestural quality or movement We're going to keep it simple and i'm loving these little assignments. I love how much you're participating I hope you're enjoying them and i'm trying to keep them not just about Let me copy this that you painted I'm trying to build on drawing skills sketching skills keeping a painterly style So hopefully this will also be a lesson in that. All right, let's get started Okay for this homework assignment You just need some simple materials a little sketch pad a pencil or a charcoal pencil or a piece of vine charcoal Whatever you choose to use and what this is called is gesture drawing or gesture sketching It's something that I did back in graphic design Um When I had an art class I didn't have many art classes, but I had a an art teacher that was really good And she had us literally go out in life and find something that was moving Actually, you don't have to do it with something moving and sketch each um Little sketch could only be like 10 seconds. It might have even been less than that So I would go to the mall She'd require over the weekend for us to have like 200 gesture sketches Now that sounds crazy and I thought it sounded crazy at first. Um until I realized how fast these literally are You're and trust me when you first start them, they feel so awkward. They feel strange. Um, you want to Start to get more meticulous and slow down and work on every little thing And then by the end after you do so many of them you start to develop that style But you'll start seeing how you can develop a looser More gestural quality in your work when you uh, when you do these little exercises. So enough of me talking. Let's get started All right now the term gesture drawing I think Predominantly applies to the human form. Um, you know, the word gesture sounds like, you know, something that's animate And uh, and humans have gesture and animals have gesture But you don't have to do a if you don't have one of these mannequins You can find something in life if you want some people or something But you can also do an animate object for this The point is to get that quick sketch that gestural field or whatever you're drawing even if it's an apple You can basically just turn it in different directions sketch it relatively quickly and move on keep those sketchy lines too Don't worry about your lines being perfect. That's part of it. You know, we want to keep this loose and free But if you are using a little mannequin or model, um, that is kind of typical with gestural drawing One of the points of it is to get the line of gesture the, um, the motion Let me zoom back a little bit so you can kind of see him at the same time Um, I want to look at right now. What do I see that's kind of dynamic in in the gesture of of him or her? um, it is I it's kind of like the head and the spine and I see this head's kind of um, It's kind of got a little his chest is kind of coming out a little bit And kind of like this so then we can do the head He's got that little neck thing his little chest is kind of coming out like that And then his hips are kind of going back So you're getting that line of gesture and you see how it already feels a little bit gestural how he's moving Um, and then you just I don't he doesn't have a hand So I'll just make one up and uh, then you kind of finish it out So it's really just to try to get a sense of Of feeling and gesture now once again if you're doing an inanimate object The point of the lesson then will be you know just to sketch quickly and get that that neat sketchy Kind of quality to your painting So get that line of gesture first if you're doing a a human form And you know, even if you don't like drawing or you know working with humans This exercise will still help you because if you're enhancing your drawing skills and your ability to sketch in a painterly loose way, you're going to really advance whatever type of Subject matter that you like. All right, so let's do another one You see how I got that little kind of like, you know, I am proud walking down the street kind of motion All right, let's do something else to get a gestural quality Um, I think he lost his hand because I'm probably too Too hard on him. Um, let's do like, um Something like that, okay So the line of gesture for something like that would be this kind of like I said, I kind of think about the spine He's kind of hunched over and then he's got a leg that's kind of coming out and down here So we've got the head that the line of gesture really does seem to help We've got the body here. His little chest is kind of like right here And again, I I read something that said 45 seconds on these and I think you can I'm not taking 45 seconds to do these. You can do them faster than that But it'll it'll really help you to loosen up and to learn to paint with more expression or draw paint and draw with more expression Um, so, uh, give these a try. I'll give the homework parameters Um, uh in the beginning of how many to do and how to turn it in so All right, let's do one more Okay, so what's this line of gesture? I hope you can see him your angle is not the same as mine He's kind of like I'm gonna do this one bigger Okay, so we've got head We've got this body's kind of hey look at me Kind of curved over like like The shoulders kind of cocked back here again. I don't know where the forearm is Hips are it's got kind of an s-shaped curve to this guy Hips are kind of curved. I didn't quite get this one. I think the other ones I got were a little better And these do not have to be that proportionate or anything. It's just to Start working um more quickly and with more feeling. I think that's the the neat thing about The gesture drawing his shoulder was up a little higher. That's what I'm missing there. He's like got his shoulder cocked up there All right, so get that line of gesture work quickly And um have fun with these, you know, this is not supposed to be um anything where you're like Oh, my work has to be so perfect. It's it's about fun and loosening up. All right Following I'm going to give some examples of other things that you can do for gesture drawings They don't have to be people now. I did a little gesture sketching With some cows the other day The cows that are in my backyard by my past I mean by the pasture in my backyard And cows are pretty good for doing this because they don't move too quickly And if something moves too quickly I think this just becomes too hard to do like you you don't want to do like kids playing and you're living or in Floor because they're just you know moving around too fast for you to get Where their body is in in space. So uh cows are good. Um Like I said in my class I used to go to the mall and sit and just sketch people as they were ordering something or Sitting down reading a book, you know or whatever and um, so I just sketched in some of the cows And again, it feels kind of weird when you first start doing this But uh, it gets better the more that you do it Now before we get to the inanimate objects I did do a few more of these and I actually did these Incorrectly in my book if you notice one thing I'm not doing in these I forgot about doing that First gesture mark like I said almost like the spine like you saw me do at the beginning and well, you know, these were okay I didn't quite have that Gestural feel as the ones you saw closer to the beginning of the video So if you do choose to use one of these mannequins or a real life person Then be sure to try to get that gestural stroke to get started with it really does make a difference Now I will give the instructions as to uh the specifics of the homework and the description of this patreon post So as always it's over the weekend You can turn in your homework on monday in the google album And it's okay if you don't get it turned in on monday. I know some of us have crazy lives So just do it as soon as you can and I will be awarding we're going to start doing at the end of every month I may announce it at the beginning of the next month But an award and it does have to do with participation So if you are participating in the homework and in general it does increase your chances for Winning the prize at the end of each month Now here's an example of an inanimate object obviously an apple basically just turn it just keep turning it now It's your option if you want to choose to add color to it. You can do that I just used some new pastels for this you might get extra credit Or extra bonus points. Um now I just did a cup. I just did a couple of these So same idea you can if you don't feel like doing people or you just really don't like doing the human form That's totally up to you. All right guys look for the specifics in the patreon post Have fun over the weekend and I look forward to seeing all of your beautiful sketches in our google album. Happy painting I hope you enjoyed this release of some of my patreon only content And it's an example of some of the extra content you get when you become a patron Oh, and I have some awesome fun videos on the way here in mone cafe So stay tuned. Please subscribe and as always god bless and happy painting