Worst Drawings Ever - Learning to Draw Gesture

In the Staigdin Chronicles update this month I talked about how my skill with drawing poses is prooving to be a mental block when working on that project and I challanged myself to practice using Quickposes.

I'll be honest, after the first session I doubted whether I should post these or not. I was embarased of just how bad I am at this. But then I realised that I get a chance to talk about the concept of talent. I hate it so much. I always get people saying stuff like "I wish I could draw like you but I don't have the talent" like I just picked up a pencil one day and drew something good. I didn't. I don't have talent either. What I have is a wish to put the shit that's in my head on paper and show it to the world....which is the exact thing that those who wish for th talent also have. I worked for my skills, and I arguably haven't worked enough. There's so much I can't do despite me wanting to do it. Hence this exercise. 

Here's the challange: I'll do 6 days of 20 minutes sessions a week. There's three types of sessions I decided on:

• 1 image per 30 seconds = 40 images per 20 minute session
• 1 image per 1 minute = 20 images per 20 minute session
• 1 image per 2 minutes = 10 images per 20 minute session

I'll do two of each session types a week. Starting with the 30 second, then 1 minute, 2, then 2 again, 1 minute and finishing with 30 seconds. 

There's a second reason to this exercise: I have a big stack of recycled really shitty paper that I would like to put a dent in. This way I will spare my actual sketchbooks of getting filled by sheer repetition with really bad sketches and get some space back in my desk. I'll get rid of these anyway.

For the purposes of this blogspot I am photographing multiple pages at a time and assembling them in a big picture that you can open and scroll through instead of posting them individually. Otherwise I'd be posting 140 images per week, 560 for the 4 weeks of this challange and that's gonna be just too much. So excuse the image quality, the paper is so seethrough that the blackboard I'm photographing on shows up and the photos are scaled down as well. 

 

First Week

5th of August 2025 - 40 images at 30 second intervals

This experience was humbling. As soon as the first image changed I started to panic and wanted to quit and burry my head in the sand. A few images in I started to accept that I suck and I need to practice and that's ok. I also crack up at some poses, not just because the images themselevs are weird but then my really quick interpretation of it just looks like a squashed mosquito. Enjoy my beginner fails!

The last one I did without a timer but working at the same pace I did with the timer. I did it mostly to prove to myself that I can do it, maybe not in 30 seconds but I can work fast and get something passible.

6th of August 2025 - 20 images at 1 minute intervals

Ok, this is better. Still 1 minute is too short an interval for me but I had a little bit of time to not panic and try to figure out what to put on paper. Still shit tho. 

10th of August - Catching up

I never said I would do this perfectly. After the first three days I already fell off, I had a sick day and then a busy day. Today I considered doing the last two days worth of drawings and posting them as I would have done them on time. But that's performative. I make the rules and the rule is that I wanna show the real learning process. Which sucks. It's imperfect. I struggle. My discipline is almost nonexistent.

 

What I did instead to sorta not cheat myself out of practice was doing a half an hour instead of 20 minutes. I did 10 images at 90 second intervals, 10 at 60 seconds, and 10 at 30.

 

What I can tell from this week is that I'm bad at it (no shit). I don't see much improvement but I can see what my issue is. I'm not terrible at finding the gesture. Where I struggle with is the torso twist. That's where I lose the plot and get stuck. I'm gonna keep that in mind.

 

Ozzy wanted to be part of the photoshoot and sice that was the 30sec batch and are embarassingly bad anyway I just let him participate.

 

 

Second Week

As I mentioned in my Blaugust post I'm bad at daily anything. Also kind of bad at weekly things, which is why I'm posting my incomlete update a day late. I try not to let it dicourage me and in a way I like that this happened cause it shows the true nature of practincing. Yeah, I practice. But I'm not extremely diciplined or motivated and I think most people aren't either. But when we see otheers who are good at something we imediately think they are the paragons of discipline and we could never reach their level ecause we simply can't keep up. Maybe some are, but that's the minority. Most people who are good at got there slowly, with practice and failure and unmotivated days and so on. So here's what I managed to squeeze out this week. (however, I can see an improvement already, I did my first Inktober52 prompt - Punk and it turned out way better than it would have before. The chacter doesn't look like he has a stick up his butt)

 

 

I will try to keep up better with it this week - SPOILER ALERT: I already skipped Monday.

 TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK...