When I was first in art school, they taught us how to draw using gesture drawing. The whole point was to loosen yourself up- both mentally and physically. We would swing our arms in circles, take deep breaths... Our goal was to use line to express whatever it was we were drawing. So the quality and character of the line, the contrast, pressure, all factored into what we ended up with. (I ended up with a lot of charcoaly messes for a long time).
We learned negative space drawing, drawing on the right side of the brain, figure drawing... but it always came back to the gesture drawing, and trying to capture the essence of something with a line. The other thing that happened was I ended up with piles and piles of newsprint. Swing my arm around, feel the charcoal slide across the paper, step back and check the results, rip, go again.
All this said, I am totally obsessed with drawing on the iPad. Adobe's Line, Sketch and Ink and Slide, and the Art Rage app are some of the best things that ever happened to me. I have too many ipads, and too many styluses, and I want more.
So I started thinking about drawing. And how I'm drawing now versus how I used to draw- before I got my hands on all this great tech. And the one thing I admit that I miss, is having all that space. Swinging my arms, and it's both a mental space as well as a physical thing. Makes me wonder what's next. Is there a way to have any of that, and still draw on the iPad?
My temporary solution to working through some of this was to play around with gesture drawing on the iPad, and as usual Line is my go-to app. I chose cats as subject matter, since there's no shortage around here, and I love the way they move. I haven't reached any earthshaking conclusions, or had any breathless insights hit me in the head. But I do believe something is next. With everything going on with hardware development, VR, google glass, oculous, etc, there will be something amazing to inspire us and take us back to our charcoal swinging days.
gesture drawing 1
refinement, proportion study
more refinement
Cat study 2
Some studies of cats in motion- emphasis on working on line, proportion, motion
Quick line studies
An ArtRage portrait of kitty
More of what I was going on about up top.... what interests me is the space where the red arrows are. We have such an intimate relationship with the tablet right now. It's always close, everything is done by touch. What if something totally disrupted that? What if there was something that changed the way we interact with our tablets, or how we use them to draw?
