New Project - Rescued Gestures

I've decided to start taking some of my throw-away 30 second gesture drawings - the ones that I just leave to rot in my digital figure drawing folder - and work them up in Photoshop. I'm calling these Rescued Gestures for obvious reasons. This exercise does a couple of things for me. First, and foremost, it's great practice in digital inking. Secondly, I don't feel like I'm wasting any of my drawings by giving them a second life in the digital format. And, thirdly, while I'm inking these on a separate layer in Photoshop, I discover things in the gestures that my sub-conscious mind picked up, that I had never noticed while making the physical drawing. For instance, the bulge below a hand as it presses down on top of the buttocks. The shape of a shadow as it passes over the figure, the actual shape of the calf muscle. All things that I never noticed while I was drawing it from life. This is intriguing, because it means that your eye can pick up things that your brain doesn't necessarily notice at first. Here's the first in the series. They're quick and dirty in Photoshop (I think I like that style), and I'll be posting the finished drawing and then the gesture, so you can see where it came from. I'm currently, as I'm typing this, having a deja vu, so I suspect that this might be something I've tried before. We'll see how it goes.







Here's the drawing.







And here's the gesture. As you can see the gesture was pretty rough, but if you look closely, it's amazing the detail that your eye picks up in 30 seconds of drawing. There's something in that frantic act of making as many marks as you can in a compressed amount of time that must flow directly from the eye to the hand.