 Why hello there, I'm Sandy Allnach. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to talk about gesture drawings two minute cats each one of the three cats shown here and in the second drawing are two minutes each and I'll talk about my process my thinking as I work through the drawings if you want to just see those and not deal with the supplies Go to four minutes and 23 seconds into this video. I'll be using my small easel Which I generally keep in the living room because I don't have a place to Raise my pad up my pad of paper up so that I can draw straight on my drawings get all kitty wampas If I draw on my lap a lot of times So this is really helpful to put on the table beside me or on my lap I'll be drawing today on newsprint. These are loose sheets of newsprint that I buy at my local art store I have them clipped onto a board And I'll be using these charcoal Pencils from generals and this one is 6b. They come in different hardnesses But you know me I love a dark line and I love lots and lots of Strong blacks. So here's how I sharpen my pencils because that little Pre-sharpened pencil tip is not going to do me for very much at all So I use an exacto knife to carve the wood you want to carve the wood and not The charcoal inside the pencil. This is willow charcoal. It's very soft and If you're anything like me and you're a klutz with a knife It takes a while to get used to how to sharpen it I'm using my left thumb to push and my right hand is only used to guide the direction of The knife so I'm kind of going at a curve because I what I don't want to do is cut the lead itself or the charcoal itself And if I sharpen a regular pencil this way I don't want to cut the the lead in any pencil because that's going to risk breaking it Because breaking it will happen a lot when you sharpen your pencils by hand I usually take maybe half a dozen or more to my life drawing group because we draw for three hours And I'm going to kind of bust through a whole bunch of pencils So I sit before I go and I sharpen a whole bunch So that I'm only doing the fine tip sharpening when I get there because this takes a little bit of time and You have to either do it over paper or over the garbage can or something because you see there's lots of wood shavings that end up everywhere And then I can just use my little box sharpener When I'm at my drawing group and just get the tip sharpened Especially if I have enough of the tip showing enough of the wood carved away That I can sharpen it a few times before getting started and it's roughly sharp ish now But I want it to get sharper. So this is my little box sharpener for pastels and charcoal and it has this little grid in it and The box down below catches all of the charcoal That you end up sharpening off your pencil and then you can use that which is nice I like that while this wire thing is really stiff, you know, it's not going to give too much It has enough give that it's not going to bust the tip of the pencil as I'm sharpening it So it doesn't really wreck the charcoal just allows me to Get a really fine point on it and that's the part that I sharpen when I'm in my drawing group I don't have to have anything that's going to spill out all over the place Except when I open this up and I have all of that extra charcoal down there I will use a pastel blender in order to pick some of that up and use it for my drawing and I will be doing some of that today So let's get started drawing shall we? So what is a gesture drawing anyway? It is a quick drawing that captures the essence of whatever it is that you're trying to draw Like whatever's in front of you that you want to put on paper a gesture drawing in Some sort of simple way captures that essence if you Google gesture drawings You will find so many styles for gesture drawings because your dress gesture drawing is Like the calligraphy I talk about in watercolor. It's it's like the line quality that you have that no one else has It's your handwriting on paper as an artist And developing that through gesture drawing is just a really helpful way to know how your hand moves and what makes your drawings yours What I started doing during my life drawing group I've been in this group for just a couple of years now and Every Thursday we get together and we have a model and we draw the model we start off with ten two-minute gesture drawings And that is actually turned into my very favorite part of the three-hour session and For everybody else, you know, we kind of laugh because I always say hey Can we just do a whole day sometime the whole three hours of gesture drawings? And the poor models just kind of roll their eyes at me because it's really hard to come up with that many poses Since they're changing their pose every two minutes, but I love doing them. I Find it very freeing because I'm not worried about getting my perspective perfect I'm just looking for the essence of what it is that's in front of me The way I started out is to draw the basic shapes I try to just make some quick lines and in these cats I'm just trying to look for the shape of the head How does it relate to the shape of the body? What are the size differences and what is the position of them? And then how do the legs attach and you know, I start out with just that really simple quick outline and I don't press hard because with this charcoal I can move it around really quickly and get rid of that line so I can redraw it in a later phase of the drawing And I know two minutes. How can you have phases of drawing in a two-minute drawing? Well, I have figured out how Because what I do as my second step once I get the basic gist of the figure in there Is to use a pastel blender that has some charcoal on it Just very light charcoal and I start putting in some shadows because I see things as an artist I see in light and shadow and When we've got a model, we definitely have some strong lighting on them We have, you know, studio lights that shine so that we get some nice crisp shadows And so I put that in and then once I have those shadows in I can actually see better Whether or not I'm matching what I see in front of me because I can squint at my reference and squint at my drawing and Say, okay I think that head is too big or the legs are too long that sort of thing and then I go back in with the pencil And I refine that line. I use lighter pressure where there's more light hitting it and heavier pressure when it's getting darker And I wish I could keep this fresh loose style when I do my longer drawings I tend to overwork things and kill them But I do love these gesture drawings Now, why do I recommend that you might consider gesture drawings? If you're somebody who's really trying to learn to draw, this is a great exercise and the website lineofaction.com that I've got my photos from for this particular video is A great one. They have it's a free site, but I recommend if you use any sites like that Pay their minimum subscription fee. They I think they have a dollar and a half one that I'm a member of and It's worth it to support a website. That's helping artists to learn to draw they have a lot more information on the website to about drawing and What you do is you go through the categories you pick what category you can choose drawing people You can choose just doing hands and feet you can choose Animals, there's all different kinds of categories and then there's subcategories underneath of those so you can narrow What you want to learn so here I went to the animals category I chose felines and I set it up to change the photo every Two minutes, so I have two minutes to get each one of these drawings done and If they go faster and you're not done Yes, you can hit the backspace button and get more time with the photo, but I recommend just moving on One of the things that I have Developed as I've been doing these gesture drawings in my weekly group is doing all the drawings together on one page This is a 9 by 12, so I'm only going to do three figures here But on my giant sketchbook I'll do 10 in one and all of the images overlap each other And it helps me to learn to ignore the cacophony because All of those figures start to blend together and they crisscross each other one leg goes over another leg and It comes out as this incredible composition full of energy and life that my Drawings that I take forever to do don't tend to have I wish I could find a way to marry them but I do love this style and I'm going to be doing more of these types of gesture drawings as part of my normal practice Because this website makes it easy to do and if you'd like to do it. I highly recommend it Whatever you're sketching in you can do this in Pencil in a regular sketchbook I just happen to be working on this newsprint because I like how the charcoal works on it But you can do these in watercolor if you're a quick watercolorist I would not be able to do this in watercolor but maybe you want to do that you can set them up to be a little bit longer if two minutes is too fast for you at the beginning and Just give it a try. It's worth trying Now one of the groups of people that I know resists sketching a lot And I say that because I am one of them is watercolors because we want to get to the painting We want to put the color on the paper well in my brand-new class that pre-launched I guess a couple days ago this weekend It's going to be fully launched on Saturday this week February 3rd 2024 But in that class the first lesson is all about sketches It's about making thumbnail sketches to help you plan your painting Because you don't have to do the exact painting. I'm doing you can change it and we're going to talk about the you know a sketch that can help you to see the difference between You know making your background darker or making it lighter than the main image and it's all watercolor bouquets So we're going to look at the lighting on the flowers and see what makes sense What's going to help that painting to work better? But we need to do the thumbnail sketches to make that happen We do them first in graphite and then we'll do them in Watercolor and then we move to the actual painting. So I know that that's like Eating your vegetables or taking your vitamins or something to a lot of people But it's really important in becoming a better painter So these gesture drawings will help with that because when you're drawing Three four five six thumbnails of one image You need to be able to like draw a vase that many times and feel comfortable with that It doesn't have to be perfect. You can see none of these drawings are perfect But they're very loose representations that I could if I was doing a painting of this cat I could sketch this cat in a whole bunch of little thumbnails and Make it look roughly like that so that I could then plan out what I'm going to put in the background Am I going to include the chair that he's Poised on that he's or whatever that is that he's leaning on Do I want to put anything in the background? I want to put something different in the background I can plan that out using thumbnails if I can Actually render that little thing and that's usually what stops painters is well, I can't draw that thing I I want to paint it. I can't draw If you want to paint better, you must learn to draw I I don't know how to say that any more clearly because painting is basically drawing but with a brush and color and if you can't draw Then I'm not really sure what you're doing because you need to be able to draw now. Yes, you can trace I understand that and When you get to a final painting After you get done with, you know wonky thumbnails that might not be perfect Yes, you can switch to tracing that or using whatever Grid method you want to enlarge your photograph in order to make your painting from it but at this stage it is super helpful to be able to do studies of your subject and not have to Like trace it in order to do a thumbnail and to feel confident in doing it So in addition to that lesson one in the watercolor bouquets class There's also something else that I'm getting ready to launch into on February 1st this week Which is the 30 days to more confidence sketching class? Yes, I know I sound like a giant ad and I am sorry about that but there are a bunch of people who are very excited about doing this together and A lot of folks are very terrified of drawing and doing it with other people makes it seem like yeah Okay, we're all going to go through this together so I am going to be working on redoing redrawing all those drawings myself as well in That are in the class and I'm going to be doing them in charcoal I think at least that's what I'm thinking right now I might switch around and do some graphite do some charcoal. I don't really know But I'm going to be doing it along with you There's not going to be new videos added to the classes But there are going to be new drawings put in there and if I have more tips to offer I'm going to be revisiting everything that I wrote and said in the videos and Wrote on the pages and stuff in the lessons and see if there's other tips that I've learned since I made that class That would add to the conversation that would help you to See something differently. So I'll be looking at old questions that people have sent in about Various lessons and things. They've struggled with and try to see if I can help in providing More content that will address some of those things So if you're interested in either the watercolor bouquets class Then the link is down below in the description as well as the link for the 30 days To more confident sketching class So both of those are on sale right now The bouquets class is on a deep sale because it is in presale mode Because the rest of the class other than the sketching the thumbnail sketching that stuff is going to be live on Saturday February 3rd 2024. So all of that stuff will be in the classroom at that time, but Anyway, I have been enjoying the heck out of this website and just doing page after page of these sketches At the end of this one I did add the ball in there because I didn't have time to add that and I did add a really quick Shadow behind each of my cats Just to pull them into a single picture But I usually don't do that when I'm working on Two-minute drawings because nobody's gonna sit still and wait for you to do any finishing touches But see how loose those can be? You don't have to worry about trying to make every drawing perfect Just do drawings every day. That's what I keep saying make something every day and you will see your own Improvement it will happen. I promise you Alright, I'll be back on Saturday with a watercolor painting and I'll see you then take care ta ta for now Go get busy sketching