Brian, I agree with Sno and Arty. Keep posting more of these and stop burning them... at least not without having properly photographed them. The dogs are especially fine gestures. Keep doing more of these. I understand the frustration in moving to finished paintings. Gestural work always has the advantage of a freshness and spontaneity. Without a lot of experience in completing a painting, it can end up looking stiff and dead. As for the proportions appearing wrong: Begin with the gesture... get the movement and the proportions right then build upon that. If you find after a certain amount of time you've lost the gesture and proportion... erase it or paint over it and do the gesture again. Try it the way we were taught in art school: Keep making your rapid gesture sketches. These are like the practice of playing scale for a musician. Over time... spend half of your drawing time making drawings that you spend an increasing amount of time on: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, a half hour, an hour, etc... Bring various media into your work: charcoal, color pencil, pastel, watercolor.
I never had the benefit of any kind of art education, so I had to plod along and discover things for myself that might have taken me three weeks to discover at art school.The importance of gesture was one of these. I found that with enough of those you no longer have to worry about painstakingly measuring everything - after a while the proportions seem to almost fix themselves. And thus, rather weirdly, when I eventually gave up on ever getting proportions right, my proportions finally greatly improved. They'll probably never be perfect, but for my purposes they don't have to be. (I suspect a perfect eye for proportion is to a significant extent genetic, and you have it or you don't).
Similarly, I began to work out that a "complete" drawing is not something fundamentally different from a gesture. It starts with a gesture, and then, unlike the gesture, you keep on adding stuff until the drawing is more complete.
Last but not least I began to realize that however two-dimensional a drawing or painting may be, it is essential to conceive of one's subject matter in 3D terms. Otherwise you remain forced to try to make copies of photos. I have developed an extreme aversion to trying to make copies of anything. No doubt classically trained artists will tell me this is a mistake, but I am beyond caring.
I also realized, incidentally, that most of my artistic career was poisoned by that book so widely touted as a miracle, Betty Edwards'
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's kind of ironic, because discovering and working through that book was what put me on the artistic path to begin with. Initially, it
seemed to induce almost miraculous progress. And then, for the next two or three frickin'
decades, it prevented me from getting any further.
As for keeping all my sketches, I make bazillions of them nowadays, and I really just don't have space. I do put some of them in a box. But they are all done on pieces of scrap paper (you can even see the pictures and/or printing showing through from the other side on some of my pictures here) so they won't last anyway.
What I wonder is how, before the time of cheap paper, artist went about sketching. How do you make hundreds or thousands of gesture sketches without access to cheap paper? I have to wonder, because nowadays I don't see how else one will ever make progress.
