Three Gesture Drawing Methods You Probably Haven’t Tried Before

Written By Stephanie Broder

If you love figure drawing like I do, you are probably already familiar with gesture drawing. Gesture drawing involves dynamic, short poses by the model when the artist focuses on capturing the essence of the movement and shapes more than an accurate figure.

If you’re new to gesture drawing, you might want to check out my article on getting started with practice!

Either way, once you’ve got in the habit of gesture drawing, you may find yourself ready to try new methods, practice new skills, explore new challenges, or mix things up.

These three gesture drawing methods will keep the excitement in your practice!

Subtractive Drawing

This method works best with a digital tool, and, honestly, my iPad + Procreate set-up is my favourite figure drawing kit anyway!

Start by trying to see the figure in front of you as a silhouette. Ignore the details. Just get a sense of the overall shape. Then, working back and forth between your brush and eraser tools, carve out more detail, a refined silhouette, and areas of interior negative spaces.

You can see in my Procreate timelapse that the silhouette starts quickly and rough; constant refining helps me clarify it

This method works best digitally because of your ability to get a perfectly clean erase. I can see it being fun with a tool like oil paint and mineral spirits, but that’s for a much more elaborate set-up!

For this method, I recommend gesture drawings between 1 and 5 minutes. The gesture drawing for the gif above took 3 minutes.

Cartoonish Angles

Stylizing a figure drawing is essential to your craft, especially if you’re an illustrator (like me!) or an animator.

Try using as few rounded shapes and soft curves as possible for this gesture drawing technique. Every bump and bend should be sharpened. This technique helps exaggerate shape and movement. You have to commit to the shapes you’re putting on the page - there won’t be any scribbled-out circles and ovals to hide mistakes!

This technique also works great with almost any drawing tool. Ones that make crisp lines, like pencil, marker, pen, brush and ink or similar, are best.

This angled figure was drawn in 2 minutes

This technique works for any timed drawing so it’s great to try applying with different gestures from 30 seconds all the way up to 10 minutes!

Blind Contour Gestures

You might know about the prolific drawing exercise Blind Contour. This is where you look only at the object you are drawing, never your paper or drawing hand, and do your best to capture the object in front of you.

I love this exercise, especially with beginner artists, because it often has surprisingly beautiful results! Well, the same technique can be applied to gesture drawing.

The only time I glanced at my page for these blind contours was at the start of each pose, to reset my pen position. These are drawn with a  PaperMate Flair pen in a sketchbook

Blind contour forces you to study the model intently. You need to look for relationships between body parts because you have to plan a logical course for your pen to move through the drawing, trying not to get lost by jumping all over.

This technique works best for really short poses. The ones above were done in 30 seconds, but it would also be great for 15- or even 10-second poses!

So what do you think? Are you gonna give these three gesture drawing methods a try? Have fun!

Stephanie Broder
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