How does something you are sketching communicate an idea or an emotion in a simple way? The quickest and best way I know, is to keep it gestural. To start, I would like to define “gestural” (as it pertains to sketching) as movement in line to express feeling, ideas, or meanings. Now before we get off all philosophical on this, lets just suffice it to say that gesture is the amount of love you give a sketch.

When sketching on something that requires a lot of thought and detail, it is good to leave information out of the sketch until the overall feel of the main form is sketched in. A lot of times this can be done by sketching the main or more important parts so that the main story can be told without giving away (aka having to figure out) all of the other details. This can be especially helpful in the early stages of projects because it allows the opportunity for others to have their imaginations fill in details and perhaps give meaningful insight that informs further sketch exploration.

To further explain myself, I have sketched up a car. I’m not the best at cars, but I certainly have sketched a few and enjoy the challenge.

The reason I chose a car is because there are so many things that need to be designed on a car. The temptation is to rush in and try to figure out every little detail of every surface and sketch it in. A better idea is to leave some love out for now and run with a more basic version of what the sketch could be. You want to basically only add the essential bare bone details that build the idea without over working it. Here are two sketch pages I have prepared. For each page I have sketched a very basic line gesture of what is going on and then overlaid adding minor details.
As you can see, gesture is all about levels of information. The more information I add the less gestural this sketch will feel. If you think of how we communicate gestures in other areas, like human interaction, the same is true. We call the smallest bit of meaningful interaction, such as a wink, a gesture because it can communicate a lot out of a little.

To finish I want to show how even a gestural sketch can be added to and bumped up to something a little nicer, simply by adding a little detail. For this last one, I have taken my front view and Photoshopped it up a bit to add in some missing things. Even here however I am keeping it gestural by not giving away all of the details or showing all things resolved. You will quickly find out that a gestural sketch has to do with style as well. This is because you are determining how particular to be and what you put in will end up as your personal interpretation of what seemed appropriate.

Tags: Advanced, Car Sketch, Gesture Sketching, Line Quality, Sketchbook Pro

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under Toolbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.