This month the Love Life Drawing study group is focusing on gesture drawing, a topic I have only danced around in the past. In the first exercise, Kenzo outlined some techniques for identifying the surface features that can describe how to find the rib cage and pelvis volumes. The clearest landmark on the chest is the sort of V point that forms at the nexus of the clavicles and sternocleidomastoid tendons at the top of the rib cage. The sternum extends downward from that, and the rib cage ends about double the length of the sternum in a line perpendicular to it. For the pelvis, we’re looking for those forward protruding hip bones — I think they’re called the illiac crest bones — and using those to anchor the bowl curve of our simplified form.
I took a new approach to drawing the rib volume this time, with a boxy figure that reads more 3-dimensional than the egg shapes I’ve used in the past. It really helped me understand the spaces involved. I’m hoping I can get something similar going with the pelvis. I’m not particularly confident that my rib shapes look right, but we’ll find out. One of the steps on the other learning track I’m on focuses directly on drilling simplified rib cages at various orientations.
Once the head, rib cage, and pelvis forms are set down, the rest of the gesture flows easily. Presumably at some point the brain will internalize the bones and I won’t need to draw them individually.
In the 6 drills above, we were provided references (which, as usual, I am not at liberty to share). I tried freehand drawing my forms, but found it hard to align them properly, so I wound up drawing them directly on the reference (in red), hiding the reference, and the freehand drawing my proper versions (in blue). I then made a quick, sloppy gesture drawing of the outline in green.
I’ve seen other members of the group doing fully shaded studies, but I thought calling out the interior features was the most important part of this exercise.
