Besides gesture drawing, what would you recommend to people learning to draw?

Not so much learning, but practicing.

I guess my advice kinda follows the process I use for making my own art pieces. Once you’ve got composition/posture/and that carefree approach down that’s used for gesturing, you’d probably want to focus on line control and perspective next.

Study anatomy, and learn how to control and vary the thickness of your lines to accentuate curves, show finer details, and help draw the viewer into the perspective of a piece. If all your lines are the same thickness, it often looks very uninteresting.

Closer objects as well as the primary silhouette should have thicker outlines. Further objects as well as delicate details should have thinner ones. Usually it’s just a few pixel difference.

You’ll also want to start thinking of how to optimize your work. One big pitfall I had when learning art was I thought more layers = better. Every new color went on a separate layer. This is just overkill, and actually isn’t as useful as I once thought.

Understand that literally ANYTHING on your drawing can be redone. You can section out pieces and redo them and still make them feel as if they’re part of the original, even if your entire document has been flattened. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and feel free to experiment to come up with your own coloring and drawing methods as well.

Also, in regards to coloring, I made an overview tutorial on various ways to approach color and shading (may need to download it cause tumblr compresses it). It’s not exhaustive but it may help.