GESTURE DRAWING with BRENT EVISTON

Posted by Vincent Keeling on

This video today introduces you to another great teacher called Brent Eviston that I’ve only just recently come across. Here Brent tackles that often misunderstood and slippery subject of Gesture Drawing.

And although he doesn’t demo in this first video, he does reveal much of his process and thinking, by showing examples of his figure drawings, answering student queries and finally doing a little critique session on student work at the end.

A lot of good information here, beginning with Brent’s clarity in expressing his two primary goals in Gesture Drawing, which are to both simplify and capture the action of the figure in the early stages of a drawing. 

He also refreshingly admits that his initial lines of the gesture drawing are expected to be inaccurate, and so a sensible strategy is to keep those first lines both light and soft, and thus easily adjustable; This might sound strange to beginners, but professional artists expect mistakes, and just learn to get better at fixing them as they go.

Another part I found fascinating was also to do with the subject of accuracy, and what you might call intentional mistakes; For later Brent says that for him cold accuracy was the primary goal; but instead, he preferred to exaggerate elements to lend a more dynamic quality to the drawing.

And this dynamic element can also be helped with the nature of the line quality and how varying speeds and pencil strokes can communicate energy and even a sense of three-dimensional form.

Another thought that struck me was how Brent often prefers the look and aesthetics of his relatively quick gesture drawings compared with his more polished longer form drawings. And this is something I confess to being the same for me too, both with drawings and paintings.

One last piece of advice which relates to this issue of time is that while gesture drawings are often seen as quick warm up exercises with times varying from 30 seconds to ten minutes, I personally find that even if I have hours to complete a drawing, the results are invariably better if I begin as if I’ve only a few minutes to get something down.

It seems this time urgency is especially good at forcing the brain to see the big proportions and relationships, which are essential. The flip side of this is to find yourself noodling prematurely with details, and this is the antithesis of what good gesture drawing is all about, so avoid it if you can. Best of luck!

Ok that’s it for this one. Hope you like Brent’s drawings and teaching style and we’ll be returning to the topic of Gesture Drawing again, with differing teachers and approaches and eventually my own fully-fledged thoughts.

Thanks for reading as ever!

Vincent Keeling

 

BRENT EVISTON LINKS

Link to Video described above which is on the Proko YouTube channel.

GESTURE DRAWING CRITIQUE WITH BRENT 

And I found this one too where Brent does do a proper gesture drawing demo. 

HOW TO START A FIGURE DRAWING – GESTURE

And a link to Brent's own website

https://www.brenteviston.com/

 


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