Gesture Drawing, September 2025

The art attached to this blog are samples of gesture drawings.  Gesture drawings are done very quickly, usually less than two minutes, without lifting your pen or pencil from the paper.  When doing a gesture drawing, I am doing an automatic drawing of someone I see who looks interesting.  Often, the person is walking past me while I am sitting on a park bench or someone in a café sitting at another table.  Airport waiting rooms are great places to sketch.  When doing a gesture drawing, my hand is moving automatically while I mainly focus my attention on the subject.  When I am done and take a good look at my drawing, I am often surprised at the accuracy of the face or body movement I was trying to capture.  The drawings are messy to look at, but so very interesting.  When doing a gesture drawing, there is no going back or erasing.  Using a pen for this type of drawing ensures the urge to correct will be stymied. 

The images are fleeting, but the sketches create a record of a time and a place.  Holidays are a great time for me to practice gesture drawing.  There is always a small notebook and a pen in my purse so that I can draw whenever the opportunity arises. 

Creative people are always observing their surroundings with attention to details that others often miss.  A woman in an amazing hat or scarf, a man leaning on a wall talking to someone on the other side, an interesting face or hair that is coiffed to perfection.  These things catch my attention, and I use gesture drawing to capture the moment.

  In the past, I have turned some of these drawings into stitched projects where I stitch with black thread on a white background using the essential lines in my gesture drawing to create a finished piece of work.  Some of these sketches have also inspired small paintings. 

  If you are creative and would love to capture your world in gesture drawings, I suggest you start by drawing things in your world that interest you.  Don’t make the drawing precious by trying to replicate what you see perfectly.  Instead, capture the essence of the image by doing a gesture drawing.  Don’t lift your pen from the paper until the sketch is done.  Limit your drawing time to two minutes per subject. 

  If you aren’t creative but want to become more aware of your world, take the time to take photos with your phone of things that catch your eye.  Before you know it, you will have a collection of photos to look back on that will cement your memories of a time and place and perhaps even your feelings at the time.  Observing our world is appreciating it.