New sketch batch

One of the things mentioned time and again in "Drawn to Life", one that's really made an impression on me, is the idea that gesture drawings are not about drawing "nouns" but about drawing "verbs". You're not just drawing a person, you're drawing an action... a person doing something, even if that something is just standing there, slouching about lazily.

As I've mentioned in my previous post, a good number of my commute sketches amount to the action "sitting down staring intently at a smartphone". I try to mix it up whenever the opportunity arises, though.

Smartphone poses

More commute sketches, this time with a theme:

It seems that people on smartphones make decent sketch models, since they tend to stay in a fixed position for a long time.

Tachikoma... Stiiiiill working on it.

This project is feeling like I'm rebuilding a muscle car in my garage... I work on it bit by bit, whenever the kid manages to take a nap, or my wife takes her out while running errands. It's coming along, perhaps at a snail's pace, but there's progress.

Here's my "to-do" list:

Out n' about

A smattering of sketches, mostly from my commute to work and back:

I recently picked up Walt Stanchfield's two-volume work "Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes" after reading about it on the Muddy Colors blog. Chock full of knowledge and great art, it's 800 pages worth of lectures on gesture drawing, storytelling, and changing the way you see. I've already read the first book cover-to-cover and just started the second, and it's genuinely been eye-opening. They can be hard to read sometimes– not because the books are poorly written, but because I find that every few pages I feel the urge to pull out my sketchbook and draw someone. Really good stuff.