When you hear about gesture drawing, either from a teacher or a book like Kimon Nikolaides’s The Natural Way to Draw (which was taken from his lecture notes after his death), one thing that is emphasized is draw the action, not the subject. And that is an important place to start. Back in the seventies my drawing teacher (one of several I’ve had) said “Subject Matter is the enemy.” She did NOT mean that everyone should draw abstract shapes, she meant that you can get so caught up in minutiae you forget to make the picture worth looking at/informative. So the FIRST thing you do is draw the action. Make a LOOSE sketch which doesn’t worry too much about what your creatures/people/scene look like. Then work on your vocabulary. If you have a visual vocabulary, great. Use it. If not, then gather reference materials. Photographs, other peoples drawings, you name it. I saw a booklet put out by some illustrator’s group around 1960 which talked about what to do with your old National Geographics — those you’d clipped and those you hadn’t. I swear cartoonists and illustrators financed more explorations and archaeological digs through the nineties than any other segment of the public. Your own sketchbook is again a GREAT place for that sort of thing. Take a hand you might have done some other time, and put it in the drawing. Draw yourself making faces so you can use them later. Paste the various elements on the finished drawing, but for structure rely on that preliminary sketch which shows the ACTION.