Key Text: The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides

I came across this book as it was referenced in Walt Stanchfield's Drawn to Life, and took the opportunity to take a look at it to get some supporting quotes. I did manage to do this which will be incredibly useful to me, but the rest of the book - whilst interesting - was not overly relevant. Similarly to Drawn to Life, the book is made up of lectures and lessons that Nicolaides encourages you to partake in as you read along, some focusing on contour drawing for instance. While I appreciate that this could help me in my drawing practice and gesture drawing, it is not what I am looking for this time around.

Quotes I considered to be potentially useful/interesting:

"You must also seek to understand the impulse that exists inside the model and causes the pose which you see." "The drawing starts with the impulse not the position."
"To be able to see the gesture, you must be able to feel it in your own body."
"The study of gesture is not simply a matter of looking at the movement that the model makes. You must also seek to understand the impulse that exists inside the model and causes the pose that you see."
"You should draw, not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing." "Feel how the figure lifts or droops - pushes forward here - pulls back there - pushes out here - drops down easily there."
"If you do not respond in like manner to what the model is doing, you cannot understand what you see."
"Gesture describes the compound of all forces acting in and against, and utilised by, the model. The term action is not sufficient." "Even a pancake has gesture."
"Look at a lamp and think of what it is doing." "By using your feeling or imagination you can relate the gestures you see to those which are more universally understood." "Such observation is more instructive, as well as more interesting, than an observation of static lines and planes, and it results in a kind of knowledge that can be recalled ten years from now even though you have forgotten all about the act of observing."
"To me weight is the essence of form, and since the life of a thing is its only real significance, I think of form as the living expression of weight."
Drapery: "There is only one important principle to remember. Wherever drapery is held; either against the wall with a thumbtack or on the figure, as it is at the knee and the elbow, the point becomes a hub from which the folds radiate."