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Gesture Capture

catch the one line a pose flows along, before it fades

round
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score
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best
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Catching the line of action

A wooden mannequin — ball head, egg ribcage, box pelvis, tapered capsule limbs — drops into a pose while a ring counts down. Two poses per round: thirty seconds for the first, twenty for the second. When the ring empties the figure fades to 12% and you get five last seconds to finish from what you remember. Up to five sweeping strokes, in any order, then done ✓. The very first pose of your very first round paints the true line for 1.6 seconds before the clock starts, so the term is shown before it is asked for.

The figure is generated outwards from its own C or S action-line spline, one leading limb carrying that curve to its end, so the drill never guesses at the right answer — it built the pose around it. Thirty seconds is not enough to outline anybody, and that is the constraint doing the teaching: you commit to the single sweep the whole body hangs off, head down through the hips and out along the leading arm or leg, before the parts can distract you. If the pose toppled over, the direction it would fall in is the line you are after.

Why the number is deliberately soft

Sixty per cent of it is a chamfer fit between your strokes and the true sweep. All of your strokes are read as one line, so lifting to reposition — which a trackpad has no choice about — costs nothing. The other forty per cent is your own read of the stroke, one star for stiff up to five for flowing, because gesture is felt, not traced. Both the free zone and the ramp above it are floored in real pixels and scaled to whatever you are drawing with, so a pose only 158 pixels tall on a phone is never held to a 23-pixel ramp. Neither half is a model's opinion: the true sweep is the spline the pose was built outwards from, so the fit is a measured distance, and the star is a number you chose yourself. Your last twelve gestures stay in the strip below the canvas, and the round-end line counts them.

More observation drills: Contour Memory · Proportion Eye · Negative Space · the whole catalogue