“There is only one right way to learn to draw and that is a perfectly natural way. It has nothing to do with artifice or technique… It has only to do with the act of correct observation.” – from the introduction to Nicolaides The Natural Way to Draw.

Gesture Drawing Club is an on-going class, which means that it meets weekly and subscribers are charged accordingly every Sunday morning. Learners may cancel their subscription at any time. For this class, that means that learners will have the opportunity to practice, and eventually master, gesture drawing as they attend each week. Gesture Drawing Club will challenge participants to draw at various intervals and different mediums for a full understanding of gesture drawing. Learners who have previous knowledge and practice in gesture and figure drawing will be the most successful in this class. Check out How to Draw Basics: Figure Drawing if your student is new to drawing figures!

Gesture Drawing Club is fun, social gesture drawing class that challenges learners to draw quick, expressive gestures in limited amounts of time. Gesture drawing is a key factor for success in art. By practicing gestures students learn observation, simplification, reconstruction, patience and diligence as well as how to simply draw a form. Gestures serve as fantastic warm-up exercises, catalogs of progress and an inventory of forms to re-purpose into future works. This type of drawing indirectly improves all other art related skills. 

Every week, learners will practice drawing gestures at different intervals and with various mediums. The goal of practicing in different intervals is to first, keep learners engaged, and second, to challenge the pacing of the drawing. Practicing in different mediums allows learners to think about different ways of approaching the task of drawing- you don’t usually approach an ink drawing the same way you would if you were using graphite or pencil. As an example, one week learners may draw two ten-minute figures in graphite, three five-minute gestures in pen, and spend the rest of the class working with one figure with their medium of choice. Another week they may spend the entire class on five-minute gestures with marker. Our gestures will not only be of human forms, some weeks we may pursue landscape or animal gestures too! While we work, learners have the chance to converse about whatever topics they like. This makes Gesture Drawing Club an art challenge, but also an engaging social class.

After each class, learners will be asked to submit their favorite or best gestures onto the Outschool classroom page. They may do this by attaching a scanned or photographed image of their work to a comment under the corresponding post for that week. Learners will have the opportunity, and will be encouraged, to comment on their peers work while I will give learners private feedback. They may also share their work with me privately through the learner conversations tab. Young artists can also volunteer to share their artwork in class! I will not ask students to share their work in this course during class as the goal of this course is for students to practice gestures and engage with peers- not to worry about critique!

This class will utilize one of two photobanks, depending on the week, as references for drawings: Line of Action, Scott Eaton’s Bodies in Motion. These photobanks will be shared using the Zoom screen share tool during meetings, however learners can access these sites in their own time. Practice makes progress!

Gesture Drawing Club does not have a planned schedule because every class is based on the requests and curiosities of the young artists enrolled. With a few exceptions, every class is based on some factor of drawing the human figure and relies on art supplies that can be found around the house. If you are interested in a particular section, please feel free to send me a message!