What's all this Gesture Drawing Stuff, Anyway?

The internet is full of tutorials on gesture drawing, and many of them are rather good, so I won't repeat that work here. Instead, I hope to offer a lucid explanation of what gesture drawing actually is, which is much harder to find. I think learning it becomes much easier if you understand the target, and a lot of the explanations I have found online are confusing and muddled. Let's see if we can't rectify that.

Motion is something humans had never actually seen in detail until Eadweard Muybridge published his book in the late 19th century. Muybridge was an early pioneer of high-speed photography, and his book contained frame-by-frame stills of athletes performing various feats. The painter Francis Bacon heavily referenced this book for the figures in his paintings. However, this sort of high-speed motion goes by too quickly to be observed with the naked eye, so we are not accustomed to seeing it frozen in time. Because of this, these single still frames don't look like motion, they look strange and unnatural. This effect can also be seen in still photographs from modern sports magazines. Therefore, in order to draw a motion that looks realistic, you paradoxically need to make it less real. You cannot just draw the motion the way it really is.

This is what gesture drawing is really about. We start with an abstract line that represents the motion we wish to communicate, and then we hammer the figure into it. Getting the gesture right is the difference between an action shot looking exciting and dynamic, or static and boring.

With this in mind, we can now study gesture drawing tutorials with more comprehension of what we are meant to be doing, and why.

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