The mixture of slow contour and quick gesture is great!

It's hard and I'm not sure what I get out of it. I like the idea of capturing the moment though. Usually I try and remember the moment I want to portray or capture it in a video or photo.   jI'm not s

So I learned to capture the basic shape of the dove with the very round head, oval for the body and then adding the tail feathers became easier. I applied the same strategy with the delightful foxes by seeing the inverted triangle for the head and the two little triangles for ears. To capture the body, the blind contour exercise was really helpful. This was still very challenging and I see why we are told over and over to be gentle with ourselves... so true and hard to do!

Agreed - very hard. Need to practice more! Butterflies and a couple of dragonflies came by...

This is fun but very hard work of the hand, eye and brain.  I was watching a squirrel and saw so many different interesting postures. I noticed that the proportions or lengths of tail, legs and body varied greatly depending on the action.  So, when climbing a tree the body seems to shrink; the tail flick shortens the tail; holding onto a tree with legs spread makes legs seem much longer etc.

This has been a good practice for me. I am outdoors a lot and have really struggled with capturing an animal/plant on paper without the help of a photo. This exercise is giving me a new way to put things on paper. I notice a particular way the animal stands or move on different terrain and positions they take.

I think gesture drawing will help me improve my eye hand coordination while drawing.  I think I focus on the shape for sure more than the details on the interior, which helps me draw a bit faster.  I feel slow though, so this is going to need lots of practice.  Also, it is hard to get proportions with moving subjects.

While observing outside  to find something moving to capture the movement on paper, I spotted a humming bird and a pigeon. My cat joined in this morning observation session!  

Alaskan Red Foxes

Gesture drawing is certainly a challenge. I need to press harder and trust myself more that I can do this! The duck sometimes looks animated - a mixture of what I saw and what I thought I saw.

Gesture drawing is helpful, hard and fun, all at the same time. I'm learning to draw the "idea" and not worrying with details. I noticed contour, movement and specific details.

I need a lot more practice on this task.  I found it very difficult at catch actions on paper.  The birds were so fast moving around.  The moment I put down the pencil the bird moved to another position.  I did get a chance to really take in the behavior of the birds, so that was a positive.

Practice gesture drawing off a short video of my Sebastopol geese. It helped that the video was about eight seconds and I played it on a continuous loop. The are very expressive with their head and neck gestures.

Gesture drawing helps me to trust my hand eye coordination is working on a level that is quicker than I realize as I can get basic shapes that are fairly accurate in a short period of time.  It forces one to consider the geometry that is implied in all shapes throughout nature.  The 30 and 60 sec gesture drawings were much easier than the fox movements.  That one was particularly frustrating to capture as both moved at intervals of a few seconds.  I think if I find some videos of nature and practice this technique more, it'll become easier to capture movements.

I noticed that gesture drawing make me focus more on subject and try to capture movement quickly. When looking at the drawings, I noticed that o mech is revealed that I did not pay attention to when I was looking. It clarifies movement in an interesting way. Also, it shows postures and give a hint about behavior. I will keep trying this technique in my future drawings. Below are my drawings while watching the videos for this course.

I sat outside with my dogs long enough, that the hummingbirds kept landing in the branches above me to sing! (I was near the feeder) Eventually the cardinal and other birds popped in.  They kept moving, but as expected, they repeated a lot of the same positions.  I started seeing the shape, and dark vs. light.  Observing with the purpose of gesture drawing, made me notice the same shape and pattern on another occasion.  I was reading a workbook, but looked up and saw a hummingbird and was able to make a quick note on the page - the line of the tail and wing, and where the darks were.  We strengthen the muscles we exercise!    

I think gesture drawing is helping me to see shapes of subjects that I need to get first in order to capture what I'm looking at.  I found it hard to do that when the subjects move a lot - like the kit fox.  I had to watch that video several times.  Gesture is helping me to stay looser with drawing, instead of getting lost in the details.

I don't know if it's gesture drawing or the course in general, but through these exercises, I am definitely practicing everything we have learned so far: comparing tails, shapes, colors, identifying the light, remembering specific traits, organizing the page to my liking to leave space for annotations. It's not easy but I watched the fox video 4 times to do my drawings. I can't wait to try it in the field.

Gesture drawing is super helpful. It requires courage! The biggest thing I've noticed is that I am having to work out what shape identifies the subject much more quickly than when drawing something still e.g. the overall shape of the subject down quickly and seeing where the detail is helpful to work out what it is and what it's doing.  I am looking forward to seeing improvement in these skills - I can see how practice will be required.

The usual suspects were nowhere to be found in my yard today. The local pond had more options for gesture drawing. The vultures were gathered on the far side. The geese apparently wanted a close-up so I obliged as they stood motionless—not comprehending my gesture assignment! I did get an entire page of small hieroglyphs—the distant vultures. I’ll go back early morning and get a closer view/better sit spot and try again.

My foxes turned out really badly at first, so I had to redo it, the second a small bit  better. The birds were much easier, because I draw birds a lot.

Behavior of the animals

As a beginner in drawing in general, all of the exercises are challenging to me. Gesture drawing requires lots of focus and concentration. I also realise the benefits of practicing blind contour drawing in preparation for gesture drawing as you need to sometimes draw while looking at the subject.

There's often a huge flock of geese (>75 birds) grazing on grass shoots on the banks of the Neckar in Heidelberg. I've been wanting to check them out up close for some time and this exercise was a great incentive. I learned so much sitting among them watching. They move like dinosaurs! There are at least four breeds sharing the space (greylag, swan, Canadian, and Egyptian) - though they keep to their own within that space. There are individual birds among the swan geese that steer the entire flock with honking calls; the breeds have quite different sounding honks. The air was filled with the sound of their grazing!