No. 165, Gesture Drawing at the Old Ball Game

Baseball Drawing Fun

Yesterday I went with my wife and some friends to a local baseball game. The team is a collegiate woodbat team, a member of the West Coast League.  It was a beautiful baseball day, sunny and warm with a nice breeze.  I thought to take along my sketchbook to do some action gesture drawing.

Regular gesture drawing is usually done with a short pose of from one to three minutes.  I enjoy that, too, but what I call Action Gesture Drawing is not from any held poses at all. Your subjects are moving about all the time and unaware that they are being drawn.  This can be very difficult in activities where no one holds still at all, or hardly ever.  You see someone in conversation at a park, they actually are holding still, so you start a drawing and suddenly they shift their weight or otherwise change their pose.

Turns out, baseball is ideal for this. In baseball, as perhaps in cricket and a few other sports, the players repeat their poses many times: the batter takes his or her stance, the catcher squats down to give signals or receive the pitch, and the pitcher has a number of standard moves and poses in his repertoire.

Just as batters and pitchers and fielders have to warm up before they are ready to play, so does the gesture artist need a few moments to get warmed up for a good session.  Here is my whole warmup page, so that you can see that there are bad drawings among the good.

My warmup page, showing some unsuccessful sketches.

Here are some of the better ones...

This right handed batter is ready for the pitch.  First I drew the angles of the forearms and the bat; the rest I filled in from repeated pitches.

I believe this was another right handed batter. he has swung at the ball and at this point has already let go of the bat with his right hand. His whole right arm is hidden behind his body.

Our seats were along the first base line, so we had good views of the pitcher and batter, as well as the catcher. This pose of a left handed pitcher is not one that is held at all, so I had to watch him pitch several balls to get the drawing done. After this the left leg swings forward; in a quarter of a second, the pose changes dramatically.

Here is a complementary pose, the delivery by a right handed pitcher. Again, the leg that is behind will swing forward rapidly.

Here, the pitcher waits for  s signal from the catcher.

Last, here is a young man who probably imagines himself behind the plate or on the mound someday.

Every so often, I will encourage you to do life drawing to improve your observation, an important tool for the animator. So try to always have a sketchbook at hand. These drawings were all done directly with a fine line waterproof marker, but whether you use pencil or pen, keep drawing!