Gesture Drawings: studying the essentials in a pose

With these drawings I was trying to figure out how much I could leave out and still convey the character of a pose. In other words I wanted to know what it took to make the central idea of a drawing as clear as possible. Each of these poses took 10 seconds to draw:




By the fourth drawing much of the detail is gone but all the essentials are retained. Whittling down to this drawing I felt strongly that certain areas of the pose were just too important to leave out, and more importantly, get wrong. Things like the line of action through the body, the tilt in the head, placement of the feet, the feeling of his arms folded and against his chest. Capturing all of these, and their relationships, seemed equally important to conveying a clear sense of the character of the pose.