Drawing Warm-Ups for Artists: Boost Confidence & Improve Technique

1. Introduction: Hey, there. I'm Sabrina Gosson, a certified wildlife biologist, gone freelance artist. I've explored many creative paths and have earned diplomas in graphic design, digital photographic Imaging, which is to say I'm a professional photoshopper, as well as most recently UX Design. As an illustrator, my primary tools are alcohol based markers. However, no matter your preferred medium, warming up is a key step to any creative process. That's what this class is all about. Warm up exercises are an often overlooked part of our daily artistic routines. But just like athletes get a good stretch in before a workout, artists can benefit from simple exercises to loosen their hand, build creative confidence, and improve overall technique. There are countless exercises out there, and in this class, I'll be going over a variety of them, including my personal favorites to get your lines more confident, your shapes more shapely and your artistry glowing. By the end of this session, you'll have an arsenal of go to exercises to include in your daily artistic routine, helping you feel more relaxed and ready to create. Ready? Let's go stretch our artistic muscles. 2. Prep & Materials: Okay, so for our first exercise, we're going to do some simple linework. I'm using my Strathmore sketchbook because it's super old and I haven't used it in a long time, so why not make use of those empty pages? You can use whatever you want, like plain paper, an old sketchbook like I am, paper that you printed on and you don't need anymore, whatever. Just not loose leaf as it already has lines. So our first exercise is probably one of the key warm up exercises in my opinion. For this one, honestly, for all these exercises, you just need something to draw with, preferably a pen. You could also use a pencil, but I recommend a pen because it'll help improve your line confidence since it's permanent with pencil, you're more likely to create a sketchy chicken scratch effect. You technically can use whatever pen you want, you just have to make sure it actually works. Here are some pointers though. For example, this one is dying and maybe a bit too thin. An ideal thickness would be 03 or 05, as those are the most common pen widths. There's also brush markers out there, and unless you're always working with a brush marker, these are better suited to a future exercise, which is pattern making. I'm exaggerating here, but you can see it's very volatile. You can get consistent lines, but for the sake of this exercise, you'd ideally just stick with a basic pen. This one works well, but to be honest, it might be a bit thick for some of our line consistency exercises, as you're gonna want to see the results of going over your lines. I'll be using your basic gel pen. This one has a nice line. It's got plenty of ink and it's not that old. This one's too thin and scraggly. This one's okay, but drying out. This one's too thick, too inconsistent, and just right. There you go. Paper, pen or pencil if you'd prefer. And we're good to go. 3. Exercise 1 - Lines, Arcs, Waves: Our first exercise is all about line control. Take your paper, your sketchbook or whatever, and you're going to start with drawing a bunch of lines. We're going to start with, let's say, ten short lines. This would be about two to 3 " long. Basically, you're only going to want to use your wrist for these. No longer than you can go without moving the rest of your arm. Do them as straight as you can. Yeah, you see, I moved my arm here, so that's not a good one. Let's try again. Your wrist. You can move your hand down as you create them, of course. Try to make them parallel and about the same length. Some of them won't be exactly the same, but this is, of course, just a warm up. That's ten. If you want, you can see how straight you got them with a ruler or a straight edge. Not bad. Then for the second part, before we move on to our longer lines, this is related to line consistency. You're going to want to take one of these lines, try to find the straightest one, for me, the top one seems pretty straight, so I'll go with that one. Ghost the line a couple of times to get used to the feeling of making the line. Then commit and try to recreate the line you made about eight to ten times. Do your best to create the exact same line. Just a tip. If you go too fast, you're more likely to curve up or down, and if you go too slow, your line will wind up all wiggly wobbly. Try and get a feel for the right speed and feel free to go over more than one line. Now for the next set of lines, you're going to want to do a line using your arm from your elbow, all the way out to about halfway through the page. Let's see. It's a little wobbly. These can be tough. They're not going to be perfect. That's the nature of us being human, Go as far out as you can without using your shoulder. You really just want to use your elbow for this set. If you want, you can actually use your wrist and stretch it out a little bit when you can't go further. I'm just going to keep to using my elbow though. Try and find your accurate speed, not too fast and not too slow again and do the same number of lines as before, about eight to ten. If you look, my line is curving a bit here, if this happens, you can just adjust with your next line. Let's see how we did here. You can tell that it's a little bit upwards, and that's okay. It's just practice. It makes sense that these ones aren't as straight because the longer the line, the more difficult it is to keep them straight. Just like the previous set of lines, you're going to choose your straightest line and go over it to practice consistency. Since mine aren't as straight as I'd like, I'm just going to create a fresh with a ruler. Then just like before, you got to get a feel for the line, then commit. Try not to increase the thickness of your line. It's certainly tricky and you can't hide your mistakes with pen. What I also like about pen is it's nice smooth feeling, which is another reason why I like to use them for my warm ups. Once you go over your line about ten times, it's time for our last set. For these, we're going to use our shoulder and our elbow and our wrist, if need be, all the way across the page. Just shaking out my arm first. It's nice when you have a sketchbook with a tear line as it gives you a nice endpoint. All right, so there we go. These are a little bit more wiggly wobbly, but this one looks okay. Let's check with the ruler. Not bad, but I'm still going to create a new line for my next exercise. Tricky. Don't worry if it's not perfect. It's rare that anybody has a perfectly straight line. We do that ten times again. All right. The next part is very similar and we're going to use this same line as a reference. Start like before, but now add an arc to your line and keep going. Each time increasing the curve of your arc ever so slightly. Again, to work on line consistency, you can retrace your arc. You can do just one or more than one. This is your warm up session. If you notice with these long arcs, I'm making full use of my arm and in particular my wrist to get that curve at the end and for the shorter sharper ones at the bottom. All right. Next, another thing I like to do is start one long straight line and then try and follow it. Follow it, follow it, and boop curve it out. Again, a little shorter, but ending at the same distance. I keep going trying to keep the distances between arcs consistent as I go. This is something I personally like to do. I don't know if anybody else really includes it in their warm ups, but I like trying to figure out interesting ways of practicing line consistency. So now, this is the tricky part about this one, and that is that you do the same thing, but in reverse, like a mirror image. I say it's a bit tricky because you're working at angles you're not used to, take your time. Luckily, if you messed up with these warm ups, it isn't a big deal as this is really for warming up your hand, practicing your movement, and your confidence. You can go over them if you want. It's up to you. Now for waves, you can start with short waves, about two to 3 " like the lines we started with. Adjust the oscillation of them. They can be tight or larger. Try a variety. Then increase the length of the waves you make. Make a bunch. Then like always choose one or a few to practice going over them. Then what you can do is take the last wave you did and try and continue this set while keeping your line as parallel and evenly spaced as you can. There we go. A good set of base warm ups using lines, arcs, and waves. You can fill up as many pages as you want using these. There's plenty of patterns you can create as you warm up like different sets of arcs. Enjoy. Next up, even more line based exercises. Yeah. 4. Exercise 2 - Points & Lines: Ready for more line practice. This next one I like to do is putting a bunch of points around the page, and then you connect the points using straight lines. I try and get every possible combo to be able to work with a variety of drawing muscles, wrist, elbow, even arm if your points are far enough from each other. It also helps hand eye coordination, visualization, and line confidence. Feel free to move your page around to suit the angle you're most comfortable with. For example, this is a really awkward angle to get right, and it'll hurt your wrist. Ah. If you shift the page around, tea beauty. You don't have to keep to one angle, but certainly avoid those really awkward ones. Just keep going and be sure to ghost. It's super helpful in keeping your lines confident and straight. Try to use just your wrist for the shorter lines, elbow for the longer and full extension of your arm and shoulder for the longest to exercise all your muscles. That's point to point. Then we have something similar, which is lines through a point. Plop a dot on the page and draw a variety of lines through it. Friendly reminder to ghost your line before committing. Try to do a variety of lines, and don't worry if you miss. This is just an exercise. Last exercise that's similar to these is curve through a series of points. For this one, you place a few points forming a curve. Then you do your best to create a curve that's hitting each point. No need to rush. Just try to get it nice and smooth. You can work on speed later. And if you want to work on your line consistency, you can try recreate the same curve. And another one. If you're working with a spiral sketchbook like I am, it might be a bit tricky if you're super close to the edge, something to be aware of. You try different sizes, too. And a tip if you're struggling. Let's say you're drawing your curve and oh, I can't do it. Just pause at a point and turn your page before continuing your line. Try your best to keep it smooth. As you can see here, there's a bit of a rigid angle. Ideally you'd want to keep it all in one swing to avoid this. But sometimes you just can't can have fun matching up your curves points as a little bonus. There we go. Another set of line based warm ups for you to try out. There's a lot of them out there, but these are my go to line exercises. And next up, no more lines. We're going to be doing some circles. 5. Exercise 3 - Circles & Ellipses: Our next warm up exercise is circles and ellipses. We're going to start with some free hand circles all over the page to loosen our muscles. What I would recommend is just ghosting your circle to get a feel for the movement before you actually place down the mark. When you start your circles, they're likely going to be a bit cky because your muscles need time to figure out how to create them. Make sure to do your best to match up your endpoints and actually close the circle, too. Notice how mine start off really rusty and improve as I go. And just like in our previous exercises, you're gonna want to find the most appropriate speed for creating your circles. Not too fast, not too slow. And try out different sizes, too. And you can have fun creating circles within circles. Just keep going and eventually you'll notice your muscles gaining the motor memory of creating this circular shape. Next, try and find a perfect circle, either an actual circle stencil, tape roll, mug, anything, and trace it. Then use your perfect circle as a base for that same line consistency exercise we did previously. Start slow and feel free to increase your speed as suits your comfort level. After going over it, that magical ten times, try out some more free hand circles to see the difference. Once you're tired of these, the next step involves creating some lines. We need to create parallel lines with the variety of space between them. As we're going to use these as reference to you guessed it, create more circles. Start filling up the spaces, assuring your circles are touching each other and the top and bottom lines. The bigger circles are definitely trickier to get perfect. Like mine here are starting to look like eggs. Whoops. It's all good, though, because as I've said, these are warm ups. Okay, tired of circles yet. We're on to ellipses now. Same thing as the circles. We start freehand, ghosting the page before committing to our shape. Draw a bunch to get a feel for them and then test out how well you did by dividing your ellipses in half and comparing the two halves. Are they even? Is one pointier or rounder than the other? Mine certainly aren't all perfect here, as you can see. Also, feel free to make use of your whole page and even go over your circles if you want. After practicing free hand, we do the same as we did with the circles, some parallel lines. But before we create our ellipses, draw out some angled referent axises along the spaces. Then use these to create your ellipses, trying your best to have them touch each line, as well as keeping the axis in the center. You can make them thin, fat, however you want. If you want more practice, feel free to throw in some more axises to fill in your empty spaces. Another thing you could do is create a sort of funnel. Then fill that in with ever shrinking ellipses. Then just have fun trying out different things like filling in your ellipses with more ellipses. And let's not forget going over what you've created for consistency. Okey doke. I think we've had enough of these. Let's move on to perspective. 6. Exercise 4- Perspective: This next practice is going to be perspective. This isn't a perspective class per se, so we're not going to go super into it or anything. This is more about practicing the very basics of perspective. Practicing perspective will not only help you get more confident straight lines because we're going to be drawing a lot of straight lines, but it'll also help you really conceptualize space and the visualization of three D objects as you draw. So it's a really good habit to get into. We're going to start with one point perspective. That means it involves one single vanishing point. This is the simplest one. For the exercises, we're going to start our little vanishing point here in the middle of our page. Now, our perspective lines are going to go out from it like this. Then we've got our horizon line which should go right through that vanishing point. Now the first part of our exercise is to create simple flat shapes in perspective using our reference lines here. Basically, after you draw two perspective lines following the same direction, you drop some vertical lines between them like this and connect them. Boom, a square or rather a rectangle in perspective. Now you can keep going trying out different angles and reference lines. Moving on from that, you can try and turn these into three D boxes. To do this, let's go with this one. You add perpendicular lines here to create a flat square. Then you take your lonely little corner here and slap on a line connecting to the vanishing point. Another missing line here, so we add it. Same as the other ones in parallel with the horizon line. Now you've got yourself a box. To see what it looks like if it were transparent, you can add the rest of the perspective lines and connect the necessary lines in behind to create the back of your box. It's good practice to get a handle on the idea of spatial relationships and grasping the concept of three D objects as you draw. Be sure to try some at varying angles like above the horizon line. Once you've done a few or more than a few, we can move on to two point perspective. Draw your two vanishing points on the same horizon line, but at opposite ends of the page. Now you've got perspective lines coming from both points to use as reference. Now to create a box, we start with a vertical line. You then connect each endpoint to both vanishing points. Then decide where you want it to end and drop another vertical line connecting those same reference lines you just created. Now we match up the lines endpoints with the vanishing points. Or if you want to keep your box solid like me here, just the visible one and do the same on the other side. Just a quick tip here that if you want to keep things a little bit less confusing, as we are creating quite a bit of lines, you can choose to draw your perspective lines in a different color to more easily distinguish them from the lines that make up your actual boxes. So play around with it, throw boxes everywhere, stack them up on top of each other if you want, and have fun. Again, this is just a quick little warm up type exercise. If you want a more elaborate lesson on perspective, I highly recommend doing a search on Skillshare or even the web for perspective specific courses. Okay. Last up in our little perspective warm up is three point perspective. For this one, you will have to consider the three diverging axises of X, Y, and Z. To start, we're going to keep our vertical or Z axis nice and straight. This exercise is a little different from the others because we're going to be drawing our perspective lines towards our vanishing points as opposed to from them. The concept is the same though, but now you have to consider that there is a vanishing point on the Z axis as well. Let's start like we did before and create our starting line along our vertical or Z axis. Now we have to use our imaginations to visualize where our vanishing points would be. There is no set distance you need to place them, but not too close. Otherwise, your box is going to be super skewed. You can even just draw your line and figure out the vanishing point or point of convergence after. But be absolutely sure that the lines you've created are not parallel and will eventually converge. Same for the other side. This is where we have to consider the third vanishing point rather than a completely vertical line like in two point perspective. In this case, we need to angle our perspective line here so that it will eventually converge with our z axis line. Once we've established where our vanishing point would be, we can create the other side. Now we just match things up as before, but using our imaginations to visualize where our other vanishing points would be. And there is our box in three point perspective. Here's another example with similar perspective lines, but different vanishing points. I made the vanishing points here a little closer to give you a clearer idea of how things can look in three point perspective. Another thing you can try to do is use the same vanishing points and create a box in the same perspective. Let's say it starts here. This also shows how the z axis won't always be completely vertical. The key with three point perspective is that the axises go in opposite ways and never converge with one another. There we go, another box in the same perspective. All right. A few perspective exercises for you to tackle. Practicing perspective is very useful and there are a ton of exercises out there. These are just basic ones that you can do just to really start grasping the conceptualization of three D objects in space. Next up, we're going to create some textures and patterns. 7. Exercise 7 - Patterns & Textures: This next exercise is arguably one of the more therapeutic things I'll be going over in this course. We're going to be doodling patterns and textures. I've already divided my page into a bunch of squares. You don't have to really measure them or keep them perfectly equal. Just consider that you'll be creating a different pattern in each one. Whenever you get a new tool, it's a really good idea to get acquainted with it, try new techniques with it, get a feel for how it works. This is perfect for that. Same with your more familiar tools like basic pens. It's very useful to experiment with new textures and patterns, even if just to warm up your creative juices. You can follow along with me as I go and to further expand on your pattern journey, you can search the web for pen pattern practice, pen texture examples or swatches or something similar to use as reference. I'll be using my trusty old pen, as well as this nifty pentel pocket brush pen later to try out just a few pattern swatches. Let's get started with our pen. Just a note. I'm left handed, so I like to start from the right side of the page to avoid smudging. You do you, though. Okay. Let's get going here. I'm going to start with some dots, trying to keep them equidistant, almost as if I'm creating a dotted notebook. This helps with visualization of space and control. And when you're done, you can always check with the ruler to see how accurate you were. For me, I guess it's not too bad. As a bonus, you can throw in a quick point to point practice. Next up is another basic technique that's really popular in shading, hatching and cross hatching. There are many different versions of this, and that's another thing you can search online for. Honestly, I don't know what this particular pattern is actually called, but what you want to do is draw short sets of little parallel lines at varying angles. Let's say four to five lines each. You're going to want to avoid making sets that are next to each other go in the same direction. Otherwise, you'll lose the effect. So keep going all the way around. Then if you want to practice your cross hatching, you can go over it with a second series of line bunches at slightly adjusted angles. If you want to create a shading degradation, leave some as they are and go back over a third time at yet another angle, each time covering a smaller area. A Now you've got a dark to light effect. Another similar pattern you could do is the same sets of lines but perpendicular to each other. The lines do not have to be touching, and personally, I think it looks nicer that way. And yes, this can be tedious. If you're doing warm ups, you want to keep them to, let's say, 15 minutes to half an hour. I wouldn't necessarily do a full nine by 12 page of textures either, especially if they're super intricate ones. This is also an exercise in experimentation, so I decided to see what different cross hatching angles would look like. Another method of cross hatching is to create lines using what's called feathering. That means lifting the pressure with which you make your line as you draw it out. It's more obvious with brush pens, but you can see here that the beginning of the line is thicker than the tip. After doing a bunch of these, you can adjust your angle and create a similar batch of lines to create that cross hatch effect. Then again, at a different angle to get an even darker shade. Then you can just play around. Let's say we throw out some straight lines here and then cross them with wavy lines to create a sort of weave like texture. You can pair your lines up. Then cross them to get a plod like effect. Kind of like doodling in high school. As for more texture like effects, let's say you want to do animal fur. That's created using a feathering technique as well. But instead of crosshatching, we can bunch up our lines or spread them out to create dimension in the fur. If you want to create patterned, for example, a cheetah pattern, you can check for references online, whether illustration or actual photos to inspire your technique. For a cheetah, the fur is on the short side, so we have to adjust our lines accordingly. But whether the fur is long or short, you still need to feather your lines as fur is thickest where the follicle is. You can also use circles to create a variety of textures. Let's start with tight little circles here. Then we can move on to the bigger ones and vary it up both size and space wise. Play with it, have fun, see what you like, and how you can use it. This kind of looks like a road or bubbles to me. Let's add some organic shapes in there. And now it really has that pebbly path effect. And. Okay. Next, rain, draw some quick sparse strokes and tack on some sketchy tips at the end of them to convey droplets. Rain comes in many forms and can be conveyed in many ways. So feel free to experiment with different techniques. Another fun texture to try out is cracks. For this, you have to let your pen wobble around. Keep it natural with splits and a bit of haphazardness. Cracks are also very rarely an even width, so let's add some thickness here and there. It can be subtle. Or you can really exaggerate the width variety. Maybe there's a huge gap here. All right, done. By the way, notice how I'm moving my page as I go. You want your hand and arm to be comfortable. Let's make some points now, like a stippling effect. The denser you create your points, the darker it appears. This one is absolutely a practice in patients and one you may have been introduced to back in school, actually. For the sake of time, I'll keep mine generally less dense. One last thing that I'll go over with my basic pen is wood texture. There are many ways of rendering wood texture, and I'll just be going over one method. Basically, start with wobbly parallel lines. To add to the effect, you can add some loops to represent the knots and natural texture of an actual tree and just have your other lines flow around them, almost like a river. Like I said, there are many methods of illustrating wood, take a look online to explore, experiment, and figure out what your preferences. All right, there we go. Wood texture. Now, on the whole, you kind of get the idea. Just try things out. Try these patterns out or search online for more inspiration. Now I'm going to show you just a few examples with my pentel pocket brush pen, which acts quite different to a regular ballpoint or gel pen. Just like the name entails, this at is more of a paint brush than your typical pen and you can get huge variations in line weight. This particular brand is very sensitive compared to something like this Tombo brush marker. The Pentel brush is very much a brush, whereas the Tombo is more of a marker that's in the shape of a brush. It's a lot sturdier and takes pressure differently. To start, I'll show off the pocket brush. I barely need to touch the paper to start creating a fine line. Increase the pressure just a bit to get a thicker line. Just do a few of these lines at varying pressure intensity to get a feel for how this particular tool should be used. To practice line work, you can create these sort of loops while varying the width of your line up thin, down, thicker, and so on. Another thing you can practice is feathering. Start with a slightly heavier pressure and then lift as you create your line. With the brush pen, the effect is much more obvious as it is a lot more sensitive to changes in pressure. You can create little tufts of grass or fur like this. Notice how I'm barely touching down with my pen. It really doesn't need much. You can practice cross hatching with it, too. This is a good way to practice creating thin lines with it. Same idea as our other hatching patterns, sets of short lines at varying angles. And then we cross hatch. We can also practice creating circles, which is a bit tricky with this pen because you want to keep your marks consistent. Notice how I'm holding my brush completely vertically for better control. Keep playing around as you want. I'm also going to do a few examples with our little Tombo brush marker here. Same idea. We start with creating multiple lines of varying widths. With this pen, you can create really big marks by angling it to its side. Now our loops. Get a good feel for the pressure needed to create your desired line width. It's quite different if you compare it to the pocket brush. You can especially tell when feathering how the line variation, while still apparent, is less obvious. Hatching and cross hatching. Some circles. I had fun making a sort of textured look with these. And with the tombo there are two ends. So just a quick pattern to fill this page up, I'll do some stippling with the fine point nib to give you an idea of how it differs from a regular pen. So, there you go. A full page of pattern practice. Absolutely a useful exercise to do, especially when you're trying out new tools. And next up, we're going to explore some three D forms. 8. Exercise 6 - 3D Shapes: In this lesson, we're going to be playing around a little bit with three D shapes. For this first part, you're going to want to use a pencil instead of a pen because we're going to be erasing our lines. These first exercises, I wouldn't necessarily consider them warm ups per se, but they are definitely good practice and good exercises to do, I thought I'd show them a little bit. We've done some perspective now and a little bit of practicing lines and circles. What we're going to do a little bit here is create a few three D shapes. Now, three D shapes is a huge topic, this is just a little bit of an introduction and we're going to start with a box like we created in our perspective lesson. Feel free to draw your vanishing points if you want to, but I just guestimated it here. For these exercises, we're going to want to be able to see through our shapes. To start, we're going to have fun adding to and subtracting from our shapes. For this box, for example, let's slice through it. You want to create the same line on corresponding sides of your box. Add some shading if you want to really bring it out. Now we have our new shape. Feel free to erase your extra lines too. Let's do something else with a brand new box. This time, we'll add another box on top of it. We need to consider that this new box is sharing the same perspective. We can start by drawing the plane that will be intersecting our first box. Then create the remaining sides as you would and extend past your point of intersection like this. Then find the corner where your second box sticks out. Draw in your intersection line. Then fill in your planes or sides like this. You can pretend the sun is shining from somewhere too to use as a reference for a bit of shading. I did it a bit less e fare though. If you want, you can try and add more boxes to your little creation or start again. With this one, I'm going to cut into it again this time making a triangular indent. We'll divide our two sides to find the center point of each. Then use the lines we've created to make our new shape. As with the previous boxes, once we find our shape, we can shade it in. You could have fun doing all sorts of different experiments with cutting into shapes and adding on to shapes. So far, we've just played with boxes and straight lines and angles. Let's introduce some new shapes. We've practiced our circles, so let's try one out. This is a flat circle, but as soon as you add an ellipse to it, it's a sphere now. Let's play with it. You have these two planes here so you can solidify these and match them up and check it out. You just created a whole new object. Let's try it again. We've got our center here, but let's say we want a tighter angle. Add another ellipse, making sure it goes through those connecting points. Now, you can use that one as your new cut line. Here we are, a more acute angle. It's almost like Pac man or something. He's going to eat them. He's like, Oh, no. Yeah, feel free to goof around to make this a little bit more interesting if you want. Like, why not change this little dude into a frog? Throw on some little circles and another sphere for his body and boom, you've created an organic critter of sorts. It doesn't have to be a frog. Throw on some ears, tail, whatever. Just have fun. Back to the actual exercise. Let's say you want to create a cylinder. We start off with a little ellipse here, then drag down some straight lines and another parallel ellipse at our endpoints. There we go. That's our cylinder. You can, if you want draw another ellipse at a bit of an angle here. Make sure it touches your lines and here we have a cut cylinder. And just keep at it and have fun. What other things can we do? If you start with a triangle, but make it rounded at the end, you have yourself a cone. Then you can add another ellipse and chop off its little head. Now it's like you have a little panel for somebody to talk. What else? Something fun we can do. Let's start by creating a little three D rectangle like that. We're going to make a very basic car. You can visualize this as a piece of clay that you want to cut into. Create a curve here for the front, then match up using your perspective line where the other side would start. If you notice your base rectangle is too short, go ahead and extend it. Slap on some basic wheels here. I did these fast, but make sure they also match the same perspective. Oh I'm doing this a little willy nilly just to show you the idea, but you can throw in some extras like a windshield or a door. Again, it has to match up perspective wise. Not quite the right type of door for our car, but anyway, let's throw on a bed on top of this car. Why not? This person likes to gaze at the stars, and so they have a bed on top of their car. And let's not forget a pillow. Okay, weird looking car done. Let's try out something else. So we got our transparent box. How about we create something similar to this, but using a cylinder instead of a triangle. So draw out your cylinder following the same planes and same perspective. Then cut it out like you did before. One last one. Let's create another box, but with this one, we're going to add a roof to it. One way of doing this is to create a brand new box right on top of it, and then create a sort of triangular shape out of this box for our roof. Et's find our center point. Drag down our roof lines. Make sure they go a little past our other box. There we go. A basic house shape. You can add windows, a door, and whatnot. Let's say you want to add a door. We want to add in the center line here. You can get more perfectionist and serious about this, but I'm just doing really quick exercises to sort of grasp visualization and conceptualization of three D objects and whatnot. As you can see, they're not particularly perfected as it's more of a practice in visualization and conceptualization. So you have an idea. You can use boxes. You can use cones, pyramids. We've got cylinders too, which can be shorter, thinner, your cone can also be thinner and shorter pyramids and spheres too, of course. Am I missing any? Probably, but you get the idea. Squares can also become rectangular boxes. Then you can play around with all of these, plopping them onto each other, cutting them out, et cetera. I hope you enjoy this quick little demo on creating three D shapes. Now another related exercise we can do has to do with more organic three D forms. 9. Exercise 7 - Organic Forms: Another three D shape related exercise that we can do is practicing organic shapes. Let's start by drawing a series of ellipses here, following each other in a row. After you've got your ellipses drawn out, you can go in and trace the contour of them as a whole. This little doodle is to give you an idea of what will be drawing in this lesson. The next step is to add a cross contour line like this and you can visualize it's almost like a worm or something. Let's do another one like this. Drop in some ellipses. They can be quite varied. Then try your hand at contouring and cross contouring the resulting shape. The next step is to draw relatively simple forms. You don't want to get too complicated, otherwise, your mind might just overload. You can have things jutting out if you want, or maybe a bean shape. Let's start with these. What you want to do is try and do what you did with the first shapes you created and recreate them with these new shapes. If you think about it, it's almost like wrapping rubber bands around them. I'll be honest, for some reason, I have always had difficulty doing these. I'm just going to do my best here. I After plopping on these little elliptical rubber bands, we can go in with the cross contouring. This second one wasn't actually necessary, well, you get the idea. Keep going with the rest of your created forms, contour lines, cross contouring. There we go, our little bean. Remember, rubber bands, rubber bands. Don't want them to slip off. I like to do the little bit sticking out individually and then kind of bring them together. Here another unnecessary cross contour line. Then we can actually try and create more known shapes. For example, let's do a mushroom type thing. Again, with this section lines being like rubber bands. Now, cross contour like this, imagining how the line would curve around your mushroomy form. All right. Now let's try with an apple type shape. Getting the idea. All right. Apple done. Okay, one more just for fun. Let's see if I can manage this. Just draw a bunch of circular forms sort of stuck together and see if we can make something interesting out of it. Same concept, visualizing the shape as you add your rubber band section lines. Take it slow if you need to. There's absolutely no need to rush. Notice I'm defining the section lines. I've made a little more so they stick out from my base structure. You have to also make decisions on which part of your shape is in front and which is behind. Try to avoid adding too many section lines or it will get messy and a bit confusing. And once you're done, you can even add some shading to bring out the shapes form even more. And we can't forget our cross contouring. For some cross hatching practice, you can shade some of your shapes in. There you go. A basic demo on how to visualize and practice creating organic three D shapes. Like I said, I don't know why, but they don't come the easiest for me. I do hope this little demonstration at least gives you a decent idea of the concept behind this exercise. So go forth, have fun and next up, we'll be doing some gesture drawing. 10. Exercise 8 - Gesture Drawing: All right. Our last warm up for this class is going to be gesture drawing. Once again, gesture drawing is a big topic, and there are plenty of full courses just on gesture drawing. But for the purpose of warming up, or at least for this lesson, we're going to keep our drawings to about 30 seconds or less. These are really just meant to warm up our hands and loosen our muscles. So we're not going to dive deep into it. We're really just focusing on making loose sketches. If you'd like, though, you can absolutely do longer poses, but I won't be addressing those here. I have a bunch of reference photos in the projects and resources section of this class, feel free to check them out and follow along. If you want more, it's fairly easy to find poses online, even with just a printerst or Google image search of model poses for gesture drawing or figure drawing poses, something like that. There's even figure drawing specific websites like line of action.com that even include a tool for timed drawing. It's really great and I highly recommend checking it out. Anyway, back to our little warm ups. Like I said, we're keeping it at a max of 30 seconds or so. I'll have each reference photo on the side of the screen so you can see what I'm working off of as I go. I got all my reference photos from unsplash.com and pexels.com to avoid copyright issues. But in your case, you don't have to worry about that, feel free to use whatever resource suits your fancy. We'll start with this one. 30 seconds, I'm not really timing it because I'm talking at the same time. But here we go. First, you want to start with your line of action. Now, the line of action is basically the general direction the body moves. I should mention, there are several ways to go about gesture drawing. Some artists don't even start with a line of action, but personally, I feel it's a good starting point or base reference for the direction of your sketch. After drawing the line of action, I like to add these reference lines for the hips and shoulders as these are the body's main points of torsion. In this case, the shoulders are pretty straight and the hips are angled up. Now we've got our reference markers. We can start drawing in our gestural lines. Keep it loose and be mindful that we're drawing the motion of our subject and not super concerned about anatomical detail or proportions. Imagine the movement within your subject and let that guide your pen strokes or pencil strokes. It may look simplistic, abstract, or strange, but that's okay because you're not drawing the actual body. It's also an exercise to loosen your hands, not create a pretty picture. Keep your lines very loose and quick, try not to think or stress too much as you go. You can include marks that imply the movement of the muscle as well. In this particular pose, you can't see your whole body, but you can easily imagine it. So this one's going down to this side. And this one's slightly out. Feel free to add section lines that show her leg is ever so slightly bending forward. I don't draw much for the feet because again, our main emphasis is not the body itself, but the movement. Her shoulder muscles, you can imagine, are tightened, if you will. We can imply that with some squiggles. Then we can add some lines here to show one hip is clenched while the other one is relaxed. So that's just fine for this one. Let's move on. Line of action. This one's a bit more dynamic. Again, with loose strokes to imply motion. You can really exaggerate them if there's a movement you want to emphasize like her arms here. It's a pretty grandiose pose. Practicing the exaggeration of poses is great if you want to capture emotion and figure drawing. Just to note, after the line of action, I generally like to start with the legs because they usually have a lot of movement going on. But depending on your preference or even the pose itself, you can start with whatever you like. Here you can see the bum has a very strong line. I'm going to define that. Then a long curve for implying her outstretched body. Even that is enough if you want, because you already get the idea of the motion behind the pose. That's all we're trying to get at here. Let's see. What else? Let's do this one. We're going to do about a page of these little gestural drawings. Let's get our base down. Now our legs go like this and like that. Like that and like that. You might notice that as you get into it, you'll find it easier to understand visualizing the pose in terms of gestural lines and your drawings will become more gestural and flowing as a result. Just like the feet, don't worry about the hands too much. Drop some lines implying their direction, and that's it. This is a strong line, so we'll add that. Then you can emphasize the sharp corner that makes her pose here. Sometimes you may want to add a bit more definition to your drawing like her chest here. Just don't get caught up in it. Maybe we want to add the pulled back shoulder muscles here. Just as long as you get the idea of the motion behind the pose. How many times have I said that so far? Oh, I love this pose. It's a perfect gesture drawing candidate because it's really showing some dynamic movement. We've got ourselves a big swoosh for a line of action. Mm. And our hips and our shoulders. You can draw this bottom leg as one connected gestural line, but I decided to split it. Then nice curves for our other leg. You can also add a gesture line here to emphasize the shape of the action. Line segments to show his leg is slightly bent. For the arms, they're also quite dynamic so we can really extend and exaggerate our lines. We can show this arm is going backwards by using our section lines. Just a quick note. Section lines with the ends pointed up or away from us implies the object is moving backwards or away. While if the section lines are pointed down or towards us, well, then the objects coming towards us, just like the leg here and arm. For his head, feel free to draw his facial line first, then the head itself. Or you can do it the other way around. Here's another nice gestural line to include. Contrast it with the bend of the other side. I like that. It's nice, simple. For a look into what gesture drawing can look like if you push it further, by the way, you can do a quick search online as some people are very proficient in capturing poses. For me, I keep them quick, minimal, and here I'm really just using them to loosen up my muscles. In general, try to keep most of your lines smooth. But in cases where there's a tight bend, you can create sharp contrasting corners. All right. I think this is the same guy. I guess he's a little ballet dancer. Another very dynamic pose, in this case, there are multiple lines of action. As it's more of a reference for yourself, go for the one that your mind is most attracted to. I really like his bent thing going on here, so I'll go with that. Remember, the line of action is optional, and it really depends on how you go about doing your gesture drawing. We've got some really nice movement here. Nice, loose strokes. And we've got a tight bend here. If you notice, the proportions are not particularly accurate, but that's not what we're going for here. Now, this isn't really coming towards us much, but I wanted to add some section lines anyway. The pulled back shoulders. Let's show the bend in his back here, too. Here's another really fun pose. Another opportunity to really show the movement here in the leg. I kept it as one flowing line to imply she's really extending it. We've got a nice gesture line here, too. And the shoulders, you can really see they're scrunched up. So let's show that too. And crunched versus extended sides of the torso. Let's do this one next. He's got a nice exaggerated line of action here. Really stretched out the torso here with that contrastingly bent back. You can include some clothing in your gesture, too, if you want. It's for you. Okay. Almost done. Appropriately she's checking the time. How long is this thing? Anyway, we can also exaggerate her line of action to enhance the sort of exasperated emotion behind her pose. Quick lines of motion here. Now, this leg is sticking out a bit, whereas this one is pretty solidly straight. Okay, last one, I promise. Same thing as always. This leg is obviously sticking out, so let's slap on some section lines. Trying to emulate the flowing motion of her arms with quick sweeping strokes. The arms also go back a bit here. Let's emphasize the strong curve here. This is also a pretty solid line we can add to emphasize the bend of the leg. Reggie. Done. So yeah, some people draw these really elegantly, and I'm way impressed. But for the purpose of this lesson, they're really just meant to warm up your hand. Key point to take from this is that you really just have to make sure you're drawing the movement as opposed to the actual sort of proportions and anatomy of the body, especially for 32nd gesture poses. You don't really even have the time to focus on the details. Even with 1 minute or two minute gesture drawings, you can allow yourself more freedom and adding details and whatnot. You can get an idea of what those look like if you search for 1 minute or two minute gesture drawing to really compare to what a 32nd versus longer pose can look like. So, now my hand is nice and loose. I feel like I'm ready to tackle more serious illustrations. How about you? 11. Conclusion: And that's a wrap. Warming up might seem like a small step, but it can make a world of difference in your confidence, your control, and your overall artistic growth. Whether you're sketching for fun or diving into a big project, taking a few minutes to loosen up can set the tone for a more enjoyable and productive drawing session. I hope these exercises become a helpful part of your creative routine. Feel free to mix and match them, tweak them to suit your style, and most importantly, have fun with them. I'd love to see how you incorporate these warm ups into your own art. So please be sure to share your practice pieces in the project section of this class. Thank you for joining me and happy drawing.