Urgh, Urgh, and URGH!!!

My April art project is to do a little prep work related to gestural figure drawing, so I can try to do 100 people in 5 (or 7 days) in May.  This has been a one-week challenge by some urban sketchers and I decided to use this idea as a way to push myself, but in my own timeframe since they did it in March. Their timing did not work for me given the pandemic, the weather here in March, and my skill level. 

I’ve been doing a lot of prep work and have been looking at the pages related to gesture drawing in the book “Figure Drawing Design and Invention” by Michael Hampton, looking at some videos on Proko.com and Artprof.org and finally working through a Craftsy class by Suhita Shirodkar.  

I purchased this Craftsy class and a lot of others in the past and I have never worked through them. For a long time I had this weird hang up that time spent on drawing or painting should be focused on the active doing part. That never left enough time for learning, unless I was taking a scheduled class.  The internal critic is a sneaky bastard which has a bunch of different ways to try and derail progress.  Things are going much better now that I frequently split up my art-making time between learning and doing.

In this Craftsy class, I just rewatched a video of how to quickly capture a gestural sketch of someone walking towards you. I had to stop the video, stand up, and, slowly, exaggerate the process of walking to have the placement of the shoulders, hips (especially the hips), and the front and back legs make sense with how the instructor drew them.  When I was doing this, it made sense, but I know I am going to have to go back and do this slow exaggerated walking a bunch more times to create the body awareness that will make it easier to actually see.

It’s both funny and extremely aggravating that I have to work so hard:

1. to see what is happening when I am trying very hard to look, and 
2. to recreate it in my own body when I’ve been walking around my whole life.

It’s kind of annoying to realize how little body awareness I have and to also have my brain go on overload when I am trying to process what’s happening in a video of someone walking at a normal speed towards me.  

Also, I’m finding it hard to be gestural. I’ve mostly been doing loose outlines, when I’m trying to be gestural.  I am barely starting to understand how to get more gestural and am very slowly making progress.

All of this may sound negative, but the flip side is that I am thrilled with deciding what I want to learn and pushing myself to do it.