May '24

Hi! Although I'm not a master at figure drawing, I hope I can help! I think these are a great start. Finding the line of motion is a wonderful way to start learning how to draw figures. From what I notice, your gestures are somewhat stiff so I think it'd be beneficial to exaggerate it a bit more to express the motion of the pose. I think the center line could be pushed more to be less straight to help with that.
With short gestures that are a minute long, the goal is to create lines that capture and imply movement, rather than copying the pose's exact proportions and angles. I recommend pushing the curves and lines created by the motion of the body rather than the outlines. It'd be good to practice finding the stretch and compression of a figure.

excuse my gestures, but hopefully, this gives some visual insight into what I mean.

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I think the resources below will do a much better job of helping demonstrate and explain!

This first one really helped me when I started doing gesture drawing as I didn't know what to focus on when drawing figures in such a short amount of time.

3 WAYS TO PRACTICE GESTURES AND FIND YOUR OWN STYLE

This channel specifically focuses on figure drawing and he has great informative videos about gesture drawing!

Overall, I hope that these are helpful!! And I'd love to see more of your work in the future! :blush:

May '24

Thanks for your reply, as this is really good feedback. Lots of the poses I had turned out to be people standing with a straight back, which tends to be why lots of them are straight in this picture, but I can definitely exaggerate them! I gave this another go after watching the video you sent. I tried focusing on more curved lines here, and trying to give it a bit more life. Hopefully this makes it look a bit more better? The poses are pretty recognizable, but perhaps it lacks a bit of information compared to your gestures.

May '24

Glad it was helpful! Also, these are definitely less stiff than before!

I totally get that. Poses feel sort of stiff when drawing them out at first, especially when the pose itself doesn't look very dynamic! But even with a regular standing pose, there is this concept called contrapposto. Where the axis of the shoulder line and the hip line are opposed instead of being parallel to one another. This is because the body leans towards the side where the center of gravity shifts. Exaggerating these angles helps create more dynamic standing poses. It's very helpful to recognize the rhythm and motion created by how the model is leaning to balance their weight.

Example of Contrapposto below! Exaggerating helps a lot!

Perhaps when you get comfortable, you can start focusing on identifying the ribcage and the pelvis. You can also try breaking down the shapes of the body through boxes and cylinders. I recommend drawing them over your reference poses. You can take your time doing this exercise until you feel like you've nailed it. That way when you do shorter 1 min or 2 min poses, instead of trying to replicate the outlines, you can recognize and draw the 3D forms that make up the pose!

here's an example! sorry that it's pretty rushed!