I got asked by one of you on TikTok to explain how to draw poses from references so here I am! Let’s get straight to it.
Quick Poses.
Drawing from a reference can be overwhelming, especially with poses. The proportions, the right placement of everything and if you mess up in one place then you need to fix the other and it’s just a never-ending loop of bad fortune.
But don’t worry! There is a way to overcome it.
The answer is Quick Poses. Or as some people might refer to it – gesture drawing. (Although it’s not really the same thing.)
You might have heard of it, but to those that are new to this, I will quickly explain.
The idea behind Quick Poses is just what you are probably assuming from the name. You draw the poses quickly. I mean like 10/15 s quickly. On a small piece of paper. Two or three poses on an A5 piece of paper. If you’ve never done that before, you might be thinking this is ridiculous. I know, because I thought the same.
‘No one can draw a good and complete pose in 10 seconds!’
But that’s not the point. You aren’t supposed to produce a full quality, incredible, masterpiece in 10 seconds. You are supposed to look at the pose quickly, gather from it everything you need, put it on the paper, not overthink and move on to the next one.
The incredible thing about this exercise is that it really works. When I first started with it, I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know where to start, the poses were too complicated and the shadows confusing. But the time was ticking and I was getting increasingly more frustrated.
But after a third or fourth pose, with me being completely unable to put even two lines down, I finally started to approach it as ‘screw it, I’ll just do it.’ And that’s when I switched my mindset from trying to produce a perfect pose to just doing it.
The first line on a white sheet of paper is always the most difficult, after that, you start to kinda wing it.
Drawing Quick Poses is supposed to let you get into that flow of painting. If you do this exercise every day for a week or two, I guarantee you the 15 seconds will start to feel like it’s too long.
Of course, you need to be critical about your work to some extent, to make sure you are improving. But for the most part, you just need to let yourself produce a lot of ugly drawings.
Now, let me tell you about 4 different ways you can draw the Quick Poses. I recommend trying all of these methods. Some might feel easier than others and they’re all just techniques. None is worst than the other but they all will teach you different ways of looking at a reference and translating what you see to the paper.
Lines.
The first technique, and probably the most obvious one, is doing Quick Poses using a pencil and just sketching it down. However, you want.
For most of us, this is the most familiar way and it can be something you’d want to do when you begin. That’s how I approached it. However, there is some downside to it. Using a thin pencil (or a brush if you are drawing digitally) can cause you more problems than solutions during this exercise. The reason for it is that a thin pencil is designed for drawing in the details and in 15 seconds of drawing you don’t have time for any details. You will be lucky if you managed to sketch in all of the limps.
The solution to this could be using for example a Koh-i-Noor pencil, that is thicker than a regular pencil which allows for more dynamic strokes. Or use charcoal.
This being said, I’d recommend starting this exercise with the next technique.
Silhouette Drawing
In this technique, I’d definitely recommend getting a black (or any colour you’d like) paint and a bigger brush. The point here would be to focus only on the silhouette of the person you are referencing. This is a good approach because you will be less likely to get caught up in the shadows and all of the other unnecessary details.
Using a bigger brush will also limit your ability to control how much detail you put in. It’s a good way to force yourself to look at the whole pose, instead of focusing on smaller parts. This way you will start seeing poses as these singular big shapes.
Negative Silhouette
Another similar exercise is using the same paint and brush but now instead of painting the silhouette, you paint only the background. This technique is pretty much the same as the one above. The difference here is that you are forced to look at the pose in a slightly different manner, which might help you understand the shapes better.
Sometimes when we know what we are painting, we tend to forget that we are supposed to paint the shapes. By painting the background instead of the silhouette, you will be forced to stop looking at the reference as a body and focus on the shapes in a more abstract way.
Shadows Only.
Here, you’d draw in only the shadows. Forget the outlines and silhouette. The only thing that matters would be the shadows that you see. You can definitely limit yourself to the shadows on the figure only, or the shadows that are also surrounding the body.
In this technique, I definitely liked to use charcoal the most, because it allows you to place big strokes in a very fast manner, but using paint or the Khor-i-Noor pencil also works.
Here again, you will be forced to look at the pose in a more abstract way, however, you will need to have some understanding of the pose anatomy already. That’s why between these exercises it is always beneficial to study human anatomy. You need to understand human mechanics to some extent if you want to get better at drawing poses.
Final Exercise.
And if you feel like you’ve painted enough of these tiny ugly drawings and you feel confident in them, you can definitely pull out a bigger piece of paper and do a longer study session for an hour or two. Even three. Hopefully, after drawing quick poses, you will be able to look at the reference with a better-trained eye. This shouldn’t be overwhelming as much as before.
And if the big piece of paper is looking very scary, remember that you can first sketch the pose on your small piece of paper, to see if you understand it and then slowly draw it on the bigger one
Conclusion
You know if you do this exercise every day for a week for just 10 minutes, after 7 days you’d have drawn 280 poses? That’s quite a lot. I think you’d need like a whole sketchbooks for that. I know you have some empty ones laying around. We all buy them thinking that we will make them pretty one day. But you know what’s more fun than a pretty looking sketchbook? A sketchbook with 300 poses in them, where every pose is better than the previous one.
Anyway, all I’m trying to say here, is that this really doesn’t take that much effort for the amount of improvement that you can achieve in such a short amount of time.
I highly recommend this exercise. It helped me a great deal.
Here’s a picture of my sketches from my first ever sketchbook I did.
And here is a pose study I did after these exercises. (A3 format)
useful websites
And lastly. Here are some of my favourite websites where you can practice Quick Poses.