Gesture drawing is an incredibly useful exercise for improving one’s art. Not only does it help with understanding general anatomy when drawing from life, but the practice of drawing a figure quickly and repeatedly trains you to make the drawing fluid and alive.
The online resources I have used most are Quickposes and Line-Of-Action.
These sites offer very similar functions. Both provide reference pictures in four areas: full-body poses, faces, hands and feet, and animal photos (and Quickposes also has the options of landscape pictures and urban/architectural pictures).
The full-body posed figure drawing has the choice on both sites between clothed models, nude models, or both. After deciding what subject you would like to draw, you choose how long each image will be shown for. Quickposes allows from 30 seconds to 2 minutes, while Line-Of-Action will show images from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. When all the options are decided on, a session will start where each image is shown in succession, during which time you may draw from those reference photos as long as the time limit allows.
While these two sites offer many similar choices, they do have their differences.
Quickposes has a less well-made website visually, but has more options of what to draw. They feature artists’s work and host challenges for users to participate in. And, for each drawing session, users may choose how many images they want to be featured before they are done.
Quickposes also has a function where you can set your own custom time, with the downside that it will not count towards the drawing tally on your account. Why does this matter? Because if you choose to sign up with Quickposes, you can allow your total time using the site recorded, and receive a certificate upon meeting your drawing goals.
Line-Of-Action, while sporting a more neat site, does not offer some of the extra functions. There is no option for landscape or urban/architectural drawing, and each session continues until you choose to end it, instead of choosing the amount of drawings beforehand. They, too, allow you to input a custom time for showing images, but have no program to tally how long you’ve drawn.
That said, Line-Of-Action does sit alongside an artist forum, with helpful forum posts displayed in the sidebar in case you’d like more instruction or help with your drawing.
I’ve found both sites to be amazingly helpful, and will probably continue to use both depending on what images I’ve seen already (they do tend to repeat from time to time). In the end, the ease and simplicity of online reference systems is something I think every artist should be utilizing to help bolster their artistic efforts – if you haven’t tried either of these sites bofore, I encourage you to give them a shot!
Special thanks to Emony Anderson for sharing this article! To learn more about her and her art, please visit emonyanderson.com.
This post may contain affiliate links.