Gesture Drawing Week 6: Extrapolation

The sixth week of schoolism's gesture drawing course was titled extrapolation. This lecture follows closely from week five. The week before, we were asked to spend a minimum of 2 hours drawing an animal of our choice with a special focus on anatomy. This week, our only assignment was to draw along with the class video.

While it's fun to depart from drawing the same woman over and over again by drawing animals instead, that's not the point of the lecture. Drawing the animal should force you to focus on what idea the anatomy is expressing rather than the anatomy itself.

So, let's say the the pose in a standing woman crying, and my chosen animal is a dog. I don't want to draw a standing dog copying her pose, because dogs aren't normally bi-pedal. I need to understand the dog's anatomy enough to pose it in such away that makes the dog look sad while positioning it in a way that comes naturally to dogs.

This is more difficult and drawing a "human in a dog suit" as Louis puts it. It requires that you can derive meaning from the human pose, understand the animal's anatomy enough to know what is natural and unnatural, and lastly to translate the meaning. A side note on this point: there is more to understand the animals limitation than the surface facts like dogs don't stand on 2 legs. For instance, I dew squirrels, and Louis commented that they're legs were wrong. While squirrel knees are similar to humans, they cannot extend as straight as human's. The end result was that I drew straight legs, and my squirrels didn't have any squirrelly-ness. They didn't "feel" like squirrels.

This lecture was a little frustrating because they didn't quite say what the point was right out. And they didn't give a method for doing it. I noticed that I was drawing basically the same legs for every pose when I first attempted the assignment. I redesigned the legs to be more maleable and shapely; assuming that the most important thing was be expressive. Then, my whole critique was about not drawing people in animal suits. So, I can't help but feel that I didn't get the most out of my critique.

This is not the first or even second time that this has happened. The problem with having a different lecturer than a critiquer is that one can aim you at one target and the other will judge you on whether or not you hit a different one. If you want to get philosophical, you can make the argument that this emulates real life where the person buying or commissioning you work is not the same person that taught you how to make it, and so, they have different "targets" for the art. However, this class isn't geared specifically for professionals so I don't think that is their intention.


The homework was to draw the poses from the video as an animal, and tos find 10 examples that you like of extrapolation. Here's my submission.

Practicing different squirrel design