Gesture Drawing

I've been fortunate enough to have been taking former Disney animator Tom Gately's weekly Gesture Drawing class at Pixar for a while now, which teaches drawing from an animation style. All drawings are done in 30 seconds - 2 minutes, depending on the pose; instead of producing shaded, finished images, we're looking for raw attitude and caricature. Tom - who has an amazing ability to get movement into his own sketches - pushes us to draw with an emphasis on feeling and storytelling; we don't have to draw what we actually see... with luck, it eventually works something like the force. For now, my first day of drawing in several weeks went better than expected; Below are some sample drawings from today, with two sketches from my last Gesture session of 2006 thrown in, too:





If you'd like to see some gesture drawing class handouts from the Disney Studio, try the "Walt Stanchfield Notes" link.