Top 5 Gesture Drawing Mistakes & How to Fix Them!

Try the Fresh Eyes challenge to level up your figure drawing: https://www.lovelifedrawing.com/fresh...

Get our free guide to life drawing skills and join our super useful newsletter: https://community.lovelifedrawing.com...

Join our community and access our references: https://www.lovelifedrawing.com/figur...

Our Instagram:   / kenzoandmayko  

When I look at student artists’ figure drawings to give feedback, I often see the same ‘mistakes’, especially in quicker gesture drawings. I noticed that a lot of the issues come back to our brains distorting the drawing based on a preconceived ‘symbol’ of what the figure looks like.

If you can start to push away from this symbol in these 5 ways, your gesture drawings will become more dynamic and visually interesting.

The word ‘mistakes’ has a negative connotation but these are really natural tendencies that we all have during the learning process. I personally did all of these things all the time for years, to vary degrees!

Some of these are specifically about the gesture itself, and some are things that reduce the impact of the gesture.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of common gesture mistakes, so I might make another video covering the other ones I have noticed - let me know in the comments if that is something you’d like!

Thanks to Croquis Cafe for the poses used in this video! All sketches are based on their wonderful resource.

The 5 stages of learning to draw people:    • The 5 stages of learning to draw people