Proko - Beans - Notes - April 13, 2025

What is the bean?

-An analogy for the body, the form of the torso represented in the simplest way. A way to remove all detail to isolate what’s important

How to practice it?

Draw the bean at its EXTREME. If there’s a twist, make the twists even twistier.

Look out for:

-Tilt
-The compressed side, and the stretched side, look out for the angles, use centerlines/action lines to show where it’s facing.

-Lean
-Forward, or backward, pinch and stretch. Use cross-contour lines to show the rib cage/ hips are going away.

-Twist
-The skin will be pulled from one side of the form to another.

-Foreshortening

Assignment: 100 Beans. Exaggerate, draw the 2 volumes, the skin in between and the centerline. Look for tilts, lean, twist, and foreshortening.

Proko - Gestures - Notes - April 5, 2025

What is gesture?

- The movement between things. The movement that connects things.
- Detail is nothing without the gesture.

Gesture is in everything around us.

-It can be used to draw anything.
-It can be used to tell a story by capturing the body language in just a few lines. What the person is doing, feeling, etc.
- Exaggerating to tell a story is a good idea.

To draw them,

-Observe the pose, and analyze the movement. It’s more about how it feels rather than how it looks.
-You are training your mind to see rhythms in everything you draw and to consider more than just the contours when you are drawing shape. It’s important that it becomes intuitive.

Important Concepts to keep in mind

-The longest Axis - down the torso, down the leg
-CSI -> only use simple c , s, or straight curves. Attempt to the the figure in as few lines as possible
-Line of action, try to find a curve that can connect the head to the toe, or at least one main line that shows the directional flow of the pose.
-The more bend on the line, the more zig-zag like, the more tension

Some Notes:
-I initially intended to draw the gestures on paper but quickly remembered why I like drawing them digitally. I can resize them and fit as many as I’d like into one page instead of having pages upon pages of them in my room. So, I decided to do them digitally at least most of the time. I would rather use my printing paper for longer figure drawings (5+ minutes) instead of 30 sec, 1 min, or 2min gestures.

-I will be drawing about 10-20 gestures almost every day as recommended by Proko. April 5th was like a test run. After drawing a few gestures, I decided I will have a theme everyday at least for a few days. For my next gestures, the goal will be to identify the main flow line/line of action. Even if I don’t draw the line of action entirely, I want to be able to acknowledge it is there.