I stumbled upon a very interesting topic in the dA forums today. Someone asked about figure drawing and gesture drawing. The poster asked how do people achieve a figure within 2 minutes? I did respond to the post and hopefully they will get my explanation.
Quick 2 minute figure and gesture drawings are made so that the artist can warm up leading to the longer pose but also I believe it helps the artist learn proportions and gaining the flow of the pose. Practice makes perfect as always! If you can find the gesture of a pose in less than a minute, than you are more than capable of drawing a figure for a longer pose. In class there were so many quick gesture moments, all you heard was newsprint flipping around in class. It really does help an artist as you don't worry too much about features. Once you get the gesture down, the figure will show and from there you can work in the details by erasing for highlights and such. Sometimes my better gesture drawings were on newsprint rather than the nice paper used for longer poses. I found some examples of my really really old work, probably 2006 I believe. I still can't believe it held up to this date since most were on non-archival newsprint.
