16/09/2015 - People in Motion

Week 02

People in Motion

Today’s task was to go out into a public area and draw quick sketches of people walking by. The aim was to try and catch any number of things like, someone’s emotions, gestures and poses. 

My evaluation will follow these images:

Evaluation:

For this task I used my time efficiently, I managed to fill up seven sheets of paper in roughly just over an hour. Although I found this task frustrating at times I kept on drawing people. My drawings overall have not been that successful in my opinion but I do feel that my observation of all the different characters walking by and every little detail in their gait and posture was good. I could feel myself inspired by all the different people but most of the time I struggled to translate that onto paper. The same thing happened with the perspective task last week where I found that my ability with a pencil hindered my observational skills.

The skills I am evaluating in this part are “working quickly and fluidly”, “capturing sense of movement” and “capturing a sense of personality or character”. I managed to work quickly and fluidly for this task and I rarely spent more than five minutes on a drawing. I struggled with capturing a sense of movement in most of my drawings though which I account for my lack of practise and I found it difficult to actually get the legs in the right position oddly enough. I did however manage to capture personality more than anything else in my drawings. I find exaggeration an enjoyable experience and I find it extremely useful for expressing a person’s character.

Even though I found this task frustrating, I still feel that it helped me. It is great for capturing the essence of true movement which is hard to capture without plenty of practise. I drew a lot of mechanical stickmen (as pointed out by my lecturer) at first but I also populated my seven pages with some more fleshed out drawings spread throughout. One thing I found really difficult was trying to draw a person and then suddenly they would change direction and I would be left with a completely new pose. I was often unsure how to finish the previous pose and if I should try and quickly capture the new one. I don’t think I managed to fully adjust to this element of drawing people in public over the course of this task, I found it extremely frustrating and it made me feel like my drawing was poor, but after the feedback from the lecturer it became clearer that it wasn’t the final outcome but the method and the thinking behind it that was important for this task.

After today’s task I will definitely be doing quick drawing of people in public more often to train up my observational skills and my quick sketching. For another project I am focusing on character development and this sort of task could come in good use for designing characters and how they could move as imagining how a character moves is vital to their design.