/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>6572003
I don't know how this got so complicated. of course plumb lines are useful, sargent swore by one, but the old masters often had to rely on their imagination to draft the composition for a scene. like anytime horses appear or there's a big battle. that's where gesture drawing is most useful for a painter. it's not intended to produce amazing looking, finished pieces. as for exaggeration, a good rule of thumb is that the line art / "drawing" will end up looking more stiff than the sketch no matter what, so you should always exaggerate the momentum in the gesture drawing, because a lot of it won't translate into the more finished stages. but i don't always manage to do that, myself.

pic: advice from henry mosler circa 1880s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7WjcV-Sdjg
james gurney's process, shown in this video, is roughly how the old masters went about it from what we know - but they made figures out of wax rather than sculpey. the masters always started with a basic sketch, of which the gesture drawing is a key element. if you google "tintoretto sketch" you'll see plenty of examples of "gesture drawings" by an old master. if you want to quibble that they didn't call it "gesture", they didn't use the word "thumbnail", either.

the master's wax figures presumably weren't as detailed as the ones gurney puts together here. to make up for it, the masters would always have people posing for them in the final stages of painting, which is kind of a leg up on modern artists. pretty fucking expensive nowadays to have 4 people posing in some elaborate composition w/ drapery for you to paint. why is all of this important? it debunks the notion that the masters had some kind of magic photographic memory of the human body. sure, they understood the musculature better than basically all modern artists, but they still went through an iterative process, which starts with something approximating a gesture drawing, which is why it's important.