connections: life drawing and ID drawing

One of my favorite parts of life drawing is gesture drawings. Gesture drawings are very quick drawings that quickly capture the essence of a pose. The best life drawings are drawn quickly and with a lot of energy, which is usually evident in the markmaking.

As I was gesture drawing in class today, I was thinking that a good way to teach ID'ers to sketch quickly is to have them draw "gesture" drawings of products: a series of 1 minute "poses" of a product to quicky capture the idea. Sketches that are drawn quickly and with energy are much more interesting than "drawings" and better exude confidence and productivity. I think the life drawing classes I took in high school helped me tremendously in developing my ID sketching skills in college.

Check out this comparison...

Some nice gesture drawings by Ryan Savas


Carl Liu's sketches...

As you can see from the above sketches, both sets of sketches are energetic, dynamic, and still show a lot of information while remaining "sketchy." I bet Carl Liu has done some figure drawing in his time!