Improve Your Drawing Today - 12 Simple Warm Up Exercises

1. Introduction: If you're anything like me, you want to dive in, sketching and drawing, creating your art. But the first sketch of the day often just seems to go wrong. Luckily, there's a really simple way to avoid that. That is warming up. Having a set of warm up exercises that you can pick and choose from to suit your mood and to suit your scene can really help actually save you time in the long run it means you're warmed up, ready to go, and you've honed in your sketching skills for the day. My name is Toby, known as Toby Sketch Loose, and you can find me across the Internet, as well as of course here on skill shap. My style of loose, ink and watercolor sketches are often using continuous lines. Needs a bit of confidence, and I get that confidence by making sure I'm warmed up. That's from very simple things like testing my mark making, getting my grip feeling good for the day and getting those shapes feeling loose and light. I then move through from very simple exercises to more real world three D exercises, practicing a couple of shapes here and there and working on my textures to make those shapes feel real. Finally, I'll do some thumbnails, especially if I'm faced with a challenging or scary scene. A thumbnail and focusing on specific things in each thumb nail can really help me feel confident and then nail my final piece of art. Most importantly, all of these warm up exercises are great places to experiment, to give yourself the freedom to make mistakes and feel good about it, to learn things and to improve our art skills. With that, I'd love to show you the things I do to warm up, and I hope you'll join in with me, have a bit of fun and perhaps even learn something too. 2. Why Warm Up?: So today is all about warming up. Warming up in sketching gives us a couple of key little opportunities. Firstly, we check our pen is working. It's flowing freely. If it's a fountain pen, or the nib is working nicely and not damaged. If it's a fine liner, you might want to check your pencil sharpened knife. And in doing so, we avoid making that very obvious mistake in our first real piece of sketching, our sort of finished art we might be trying to make today. The other thing is it breaks us out of bad habits, and it ingrains good habits. For example, we might have spent all week writing, and we're holding our pen so tight. You can kind of feel that tightness in your hand, and what we want to do, instead of holding it, really tight, we want to be holding it as a sketcher, as a drawer, as a draftsman, nice and loose. And giving yourself just a few minutes to literally practice the very basics is really important to making that first sketch go well. Because I know, for me, if I don't do that, my first sketch it just doesn't work, and I can never quite work out why. Until I remember, I haven't warmed up. Now, the structure of today's class is lots of little bite sized lessons as usual on skill share with the idea that we have three sections. The first section is looking at simple mark making two D shapes. The second section is building that into three D shapes. This is where things become a bit more real. The final section is a real practical application of the warm up directly onto your scene or the type of scene you might be choosing. I've chosen a fun night scene today to do my final section on, but you might be out and about urban sketching. So instead of choosing a specific scene, you just choose a range of ideas, urban ideas that you might sketch, or perhaps you're doing some still lives. So you just choose a couple of different still lives to do your thumb nails around. When we're all done, I'd love you to upload your project. Now, that might be one of the first two pages we produce of little warm up exercises, or it might be your umnails, or it might be everything, or even the finished project, the finished sketch you create after warming up. 3. Supplies: All you'll need for today is a pen or a pencil. I'll be using my fountain pen, but you could just as well use a fine liner or, as I said, a pencil. The other thing that we'll need, and there's literally just two things is a sketch book. So I'm using my very cheap own brand sketch book here. This is letter size, and you can see I've divided my page into four. But if you're using a smaller sketch book, you might do one exercise per page or two exercises per page. That's all that you need today. Now, remember, today we're going to go through all the types of things I might do to warm And in doing so, we'll create a lovely few pages in our sketchbook. You don't need to feel the need that this is something you have to do before every little sketch. Instead, this is a series of tools you can use. In your little artists kit bag, if you like, little tools you can take out to feel more confident in starting your sketching and in approaching more challenging scenes. 4. SECTION ONE: Here we are. Section one. Section one is the simplest of the warmups, but in many ways, the most important. Everything we're doing is two D in this section, simple shape, simple lines, just getting the pen flowing, the pencil working, nice and sharp, and feeling that confidence in our loose and character lines. I've divided my page into. This is an A or letter size sheet of paper I'm using. If you're using a smaller sketchbook, you might just divide it into two or even use a different page for each exercise. 5. Lines and Marks: This first exercise is all about mark making. Here, we're checking our ends working, and we're getting out of that tight writer's grip and into a more flowing characterf line. There's keys here, though to keep the line controlled that we're going to talk about and avoiding scribbling as well. Ingraining those good habits right now for the rest of our sketching session today. Nothing we're doing today is rocket science, but all of it has a little bit of a point. And the first exercise is simply to get our line character going. What can happen when we've been sort of working all week and doing lots of drawing and writing and holding our pen with this kind of writer's grip. Suddenly, when we try and draw, everything ends up old and clunky and sort of uncomfortable. And if we draw a line, it looks a bit like this, which is fine, but it's not fluid. It's not flowing, it's not exciting. So we just need to remember to just drop our grip, loosen our grip. What we're aiming to do with our lines is have them a little bit lighter, a little bit more agile, that little wobble in them, which just feels more interesting. Suddenly, if we draw this same house, and we have our looser lighter line, it kind of evolves in front of us. It's a far more interesting shape. This is just as important whether you're using a pencil. A fine liner. Or, of course, what I prefer using, which is my phantom pens. We're aiming for that light and loose grip. Try different characters of line and see what happens. Now, all we're doing then in our first minute of drawing our first warm up is focusing on that loose grip, trying different grips, loose like this, loose like this, just avoiding that tight writer's grip, and drawing lines, keeping them loose and light with a little bit of movement. Draw them at different lengths, bit longer sometimes. Try different directions. We'll come to this in one of our future exercises, but we'll all have different directions, which are a little bit harder for us to draw in than in others. For example, for me, this line, this is the hardest. And just work on keeping that line feeling straight, but also feeling interesting and not bold. That's all you need to do. 6. Flowing and Looping: So we've mastered our straight lines again, we're going to move on to looping and swirling lines, here, feeling a bit more agile and getting a bit more variety into our linework. Having mastered a ha pen and got it flowing again nicely. The next thing to do is try looping lines and swirling lines. Here, instead of doing long straight lines, we're trying to gradually introduce curves and changes in direction. Again, we're trying to avoid that scribbled feeling. Instead, this should be a line of controlled looping lines. You might also, at this point, start playing with line variety. So what I mean by that is press a little bit harder at times and you get this idea of this line flowing out, a little bit like nice calligraphy writing. And just again, connect the sort of swirling lines, try and create something which looks a little bit mindful and pretty on the page. And that's all you need to do for this. Getting into that motion, that smooth swirly motion. 7. Average Your Shapes: Next up, simple shapes, two D shapes, circles, squares, triangles, other shapes with more sides than that. The idea here is, again, to keep things loose. Avoid just because we're doing something slightly more complex or slightly more exact in how we're doing it. Avoid going back to that writer's grip, allow e shapes to average out. And I'll show you exactly what I mean by that in this next couple of minutes. Having worked on our straight lines, our swirly lines, and kept that control going. The next thing to do is build into shapes. So here, again, we're trying to avoid that writer's grip. Whatever pen you're using, if you hold it really tight, you'll end up with these bold shapes, you'll end up with things which don't feel good to do, and they don't feel that good to look at. And when they sort of build up, if you're building up your shapes into some little scene lots of bold shapes. Tend to not feel great. They tend to feel overdone, claggy or like a slightly childlike bit of art. So when we're warming up, we're remembering these things, we're remembering how to loosen up, and we're going to just literally draw some shapes. They don't need to be perfect. In fact, what I would suggest is when we're drawing things like circles, if you try and draw a perfect circle, it will almost inevitably end up quite bold. Instead, consider drawing an average circles. You can do these sketchy lines, which kind of average out to a neat circle. You can also play around with ideas. So sometimes when I'm trying to draw a circle, I purposefully go, you know, what I'm going to enhance the texture of that circle. So this here, could be a tennis ball. It's a circle, but we've just enhanced the kind of textures that are coming from. Similarly, an apple, rarely is it a perfect circle like this. Normally, an apple will have divots and curves. So remembering that we're trying to draw shapes, but we're trying to draw shapes which might actually exist in the world in reality. And so having these kind of bumps and bends is absolutely okay, if not essential. So the exercise is to continue on our little page here. Now, you're just going to draw some shapes, not worrying if they don't quite line up, being prepared to gently average out that shape. When you're averaging it out, But you don't want to create a really bold line, but going over and over and over. Instead, you're just accepting there's now two lines at some points forming the outside of this shape, and you can do lots of squares. You can change them to rectangles. You could move on from squares and rectangles to triangles or circles and the dreaded ellipses, of course, often being one of the hardest things to feel that we can master. But by just warming up and by remembering our simple shapes, we'll suddenly be able to dive into our scene, whatever it is, because everything in the world, in my opinion, it is made of shapes, and we'll be able to dive into our scene, just feeling a little bit more confident about our shape finding shape drawing abilities. So there you go. Finish off, fill up your little page or the sort of segment of your page with shapes of different sort of angles and different numbers of sides. And then we'll move on to the next little exercise. Oh. 8. Hatching: Moving on now to textures, and the first texture we need to explore is the idea of hatching. This is a little way to warm back up into your hatching, make sure your hatching is nice and fine and nice and sort of symmetrical and consistent, which is really important when you move into using it in your first sketch. It's time now to work on textures. The first texture that we normally use with drawing, be that pen or pencil, whatever we're using, is a bit of hatching. H hatching is simple repeated linear marks. These, perhaps unlike our long lines we're drawing before, need to be quite uniform. Because if they're not uniform, if they're either different in length, or different in direction, and they curve and move in odd directions, or they're different in their weight. Suddenly they're just a bit too distracting. The idea of hatching, of course, isn't to distract division, but it's to start creating the idea of light and shadow. So we can have a simple value scale here, split into five. We go from light to one layer of hatching to two layers of hatching to three layers of hatching, and you guess it to four layers of hatching. And it does take practice to feel comfortable doing this. And I mentioned we'd be talking about directions here feeling important. Because for me, hatching in this direction is far harder to achieve than hatching in any other direction. So it really is something worth practicing on both for consistency, but also to reliably build up layers and depth in your hatching. So back to my warm up page, and I'm going to start by simply hatching. And I'm just going to use the top half of this little square. And I'm going to try hatching it consistently in patches, but at different lengths. And you'll find longer hatching often, much harder, certainly for me, it's much harder. We need to warm up our wrist, our shoulder, even because one of the keys to long hatching is if we just do it with our wrist, we'll get this big curving line. And this always captures me by surprise. If I haven't warmed up, I haven't just practice my hatching a little bit. I'll mess up the longer hatching. And then complete the other directions, get all of those little directions warmed up. And then the last thing to do is just try varying how close it is together. So you get really dense hatching, even just in one line. When you're feeling happy with how your hatching is going. We can move back around our page, and we can use other bits of our warm up to almost create fun little bits of abstract art. This helps you practice the hatching within a confined space. So you can practice how you like your lines to meet up. So for me, I I've got a tiny bit of overlap in my hatching. That's how I like to hatch. You might like it much neater. So you can practice now moving your hatching on from simply just practicing the motion. To practicing the motion what could almost be ale scene. Do it in the swells, as well, do it in between the swerves, and just have a bit of fun filling up a few of these with little bits of hatching and cross hatching. Now, one tip, Don't fill up everything because we're going to want a couple of these for the next exercise as well. 9. Textures of Materials: Of course, textures become more complex and simple hatching, and that's what we're doing just now. Think about naturalistic hatching or natural textures of bricks of leaves. Here, I would suggest you focus initially on things you might be sketching today. If you're urban sketching, that's going to be bricks and tarmac. If you are sketching in the countryside, that might be leaves and grass. But also allow yourself to explore abstract textures, circles, squares, odd shapes, and things like that. Next on our agenda is to keep working on textures and hatching like this is one kind of texture. But another kind of texture or those natural textures we do find out in the world. So for example, we have textures in walls, a really easy example. There are lots of ways we can achieve texture. For example, we can get a sort of modern red brick by gently using our long, slightly character lines, and then joining them up with verticals. Equally, we can do natural textures. So we can move to a tree. Now we've got our sort of swirling looping circle that we've practiced with again, lots of variety in character. And within that, we're going to have different textures. We're going to have these kind of natural tree like leaf like shapes building up. And again, working out different ways that we can do this is how we're going to warm up and how we're going to feel confident when we come to our scene that we can actually do this, and we've done it already today. So moving to our warmup page, we've got our little textures box now here. With this, we're getting a little bit more realistic, aren't we? So I would suggest trying the kind of textures that you expect to encounter today. So if I'm out sketching in the countryside, for example, or I've got a reference of the countryside, I might start by doing little simple bricks. So building up Well, not even bricks. I mean like these uneven stones, which you might find in a dry stone wall or you might find in an old church, for example. Remembering that kind of variety. Remembering also a little bit of hatching might assist some of the texture in our wall. We've done our red bricks already. But if red bricks are something you expect to encounter today, you might want to really practice them trying them in different sizes. These are quite square red bricks, aren't they? But you might find really narrow long ones at other times. So just trying different varieties of these different textures is something which you can really get into. Really help you warm up into the rest of your sketching today. Let's make mistakes now and avoid them later. Moving on diferent bricks, you might want to try textures of horizon lines. So you might find a sort of line of grass in your sea and just practicing, do we like this? Do you want it more loose and swordy? Perhaps in the distance we have trees. So we are going to use our swardy lines here and try different ways of producing trees in the distance as a little texture, even like this. And then we can zoom in on those textures as well, as we did before, try different ways of producing leaves. Perhaps these little angular shapes suit the trees you want to be sketching today. Perhaps, though, you're not sketching a tree like this, you're sketching a pine. So you want more sort of lengthy or pointy kind of shapes to produce your textures. So have a go. Think about what you might want to sketch today or what you're working on at the moment. And of course, you might be expecting it, but the next thing to do is going to be to start using these same textures on the rest of your page. So just explore the rest of your page, filling it up with different textures. And whilst you're filling up your page textures, don't be afraid to be a little bit abstract. Textures are often about simply repeating the same little shape over and over again, or with a little bit of variety. So literally practicing lots of little circles, lots of little squares, little scratching marks. All of these things you might find have some utility in your sketching in the future. 10. SECTION TWO: And with that, we're on to Section two. And in Section two, we go from two D to three D. Here, we're working out how squares become cubes, how triangles become pyramids and how, of course, circles become spheres. I'm using a new page for this because I filled up my last one. So let's move on and start exploring the three D world. 11. 3D Shapes: It's time to get from two D to three D. In this first little section, all we're doing is creating some three D shapes and getting our mind around different viewpoints. And this has direct applications to what we might be sketching, and we'll look at that in this upcoming couple of minutes. It's time now to move from the bravely into the new world, the three D world. So all of these shapes here are two D. We've got s triangle circle. They're all flat on the page. Now we can start advancing that. Instead of having simple two D shapes, we're going to remember our character fur lines, our law of averages when it comes to our shapes. And we can start making these three D. So we turn a square into a cube, we turn a triangle into a pyramid, and we turn a circle into a sphere. But we can see, it's not as simple as that, is it? Because this circle still very much looks like a circle. Now, don't worry about that. We're going to be covering this in the next of our warm ups. But for now, I'm going to go back to my warm up page, and we'll be practicing these more obvious geometric shapes. So because we've filled up a page already, I'm onto a new page, of course, Here we're going to practice those three D shapes. Stick with things at the moment, which aren't spheres. We'll be coming to those shortly in the next little warm up exercise. Remember, lightly does it, Law of averages and try drawing objects well, simple three D objects in different viewpoints. We can find that one cube, we can see two sides of this cube. We can see three sides of. Now these exercises are sometimes a little challenging because it's easy to slip up and get things wrong. But that's where these light lines come in. And you can imagine this could be a balcony on a building, for example. And it is frustrating, isn't it? When we get that balcony wrong, and it all goes out of whack because we just slightly misjudged the perspective, for example, by practicing, moving cubes around and just, you know, not for hours. So people recommending this for hours and hours, and if that's something you enjoy, then by all means, but for me, not something I enjoy very much. So It's just something to warm up with and recognize that actually, a tiny little warm up like this can really help in the real world, you know, this could be a balcony, then this pyramid could literally be a pyramid, or it could be with a little more character, it could be a kind of mountain or volcano in our scene or even the top of a tree or something else in a cafe. So just practice drawing these shapes, turn the squares as well into rectangles and see how that changes things. And remember to try and just imagine things in all different not dimensions, but all different viewpoints. And that way, you'll get a nice well rounded page. Lots of mistakes, I'm sure, because that's how things should be. If you haven't made any mistakes, then you probably haven't sort of stressed your system enough how to improve or discovered your weaknesses. And we all have weaknesses. And just fill up this little square with shapes with three D, with things which feel a little bit more alive. When you've done that, we're going to move on to the next exercise. 12. Shadows and Spheres: Now, we mentioned there that we were swiftly and strongly avoiding our spheres. And that's because some shapes aren't easy just with an outline to go from two D to three D. Instead, we need something extra. We need a bit of light and dark. And this is where our practice with textures and hatching comes to meet us again. So next, we are adding something else to make things feel more free D. So these kind of feel three D already, but not perfectly so. And this doesn't feel free D at all. The thing which three D objects have, which two D don't are light and shadow. And this is where all those hatching and textures suddenly come back into play. We can suddenly discover the hatching has a real use. Not only does it create a light side and a dark side of this cube, and sudden it becomes more free D, it also displays its interaction with the floor. This is no longer floating because the shadow is on the floor. Here, this could be floating because the shadow is being cast down here and we pop in a horizon line. And suddenly, this is elevated off the top of our surface, whatever this happens to be, whilst this one is sat down. Now, with a sphere, there are two main options that we can do for our hatching. Drawing two bigger circles, and look, the law of averages, it works sometimes and here, we've got a one key circle, but just by keeping the lines light, I'm able to get over that. Two ways to do it. So we can use our simple linear hatching. That works absolutely great. We can just apply that simple linear hatching and get it darker and darker going towards the darkest area. Also, we can use hatching which follows the natural curve. This is a little more time consuming and definitely worth practicing, but you just introduce lines which are curving around with the sphere. They need to stay parallel to one another, and they still need to not be inconsistent, but they can come round both ways, so we can come round like so. As well. These are all just building up that sense of light and dark and a little bit with hatching like this, it builds up the sense of the form as well. It builds up the sense of a smoother object. Now we can take all of these ideas back onto our exercise page. So draw yourself some curved objects over this side, some circles to practice on, and Also things like rectangles with an ellipse on. This is now a cylinder, and we can draw a couple of different sized cylinders as well. And on these, we can start practicing our hatching which curves just at the edge, imagining a little bit of light coming from the side. At some point in a normal scene, there'll be a horizon line where the hatching is flat. And then it curves down. That's why the ellipse at the bottom is curved down, the ellips at the top is curved up, at some point in the middle, it will be in the middle. A little bit of vertical hatching. This is where we practice that long hatching, which is not easy to do, and you'll see mine is far from perfect. Maybe there's a bit of hatching at the bottom, bit of hatching at the top. This is where things are becoming very real. Because look, if we pop a cone on the top, remembering a cone is a three D object, perhaps we've got a tower. A couple of other shapes in there. And we've certainly got a town. So hopefully, you can start to imagine that these warmups are really directly relevant to what we're trying to achieve in our sketching in general. They're not just nonsense. They're not just silly. They're not just pointless. They're really going to help. If you focus them around things which are of concern to you in your daily sketching practice or things which you're going to be coming up, perhaps for example, drawing a tennis match, perhaps you're drawing some doughnuts, perhaps over here, you're drawing some mountains. These shapes, all this will help. Now, we can also move on from using simple hatching, and we can use that what I call naturalistic hatching, but those other textures. Here, we could have these being brick walls. By building up more of the texture in one side than the other, We suddenly end up with a brick wall which has got a light source coming from down here. The same with here and perhaps this is a mountain, but we do more texture to that mountain here, more trees, more darkness underneath. On this side, we leave it very light, just a bit of hatching at the bottom. Now we've got a mountain with texture. Equally, we can keep it nice and simple. So just explore now with these ideas, explore with hatching, explore with textures, turn your simple shapes into three D shapes. Now this is supposed to be a warm up, just do the things which feel relevant to you today. Don't forget, you're also allowed always allowed. Everything's always allowed, but you're encouraged to try abstract things, try different textures, see what those might do when you're trying to build up a three D sense of an object. 13. Simple Observations: Now that we're feeling more confident with three D shapes, it's time to put three D into sort of reality. So take a really simple object. And I'm going to show you how I will now start to explore observational skills and using all these other things we've been warming up to. So observation meets three D shapes, meets hatching, textures, and even we might build on that in a clever little way at the end. Now that things are feeling more real, it's time to start drawing objects, little things in front of you if you're needing a bit more confidence, and this helps with our observation skills. We can draw really simple things I could take, for example, this bottle. What I'd suggest is starting off with a really gentle conto drawing. So we're really constantly focusing on that bottle, getting into the zone for observing and because it's a nice and simple object, we can't get to stuck into details. Now, there'll be errors that we make, but we're trying to just get that idea into our head of a simple, interesting conto. So that's that varied line that we practice. That's the straight line, but with character. Also, we're starting to look at how to make this three D, how to accurately get the shapes, and how to accurately get the textures. It doesn't have to be super accurate, of course. Here we've got light coming from this side going over there. I'm going to start by some simple hatching using these simple hatchings that we've already looked at. A bit of hatching down like this as well. Now here, this is paper, and I don't know if it comes across, but you might be able to hear It's quite rough. So I'm going to be able to just get that idea of that rough texture using some of these interesting mark ideas that we've been playing with earlier, as well as getting some of the value. And if we want, we can do some of the details, so we've got a big six here. Number 60, and this is the company name up here as well. There's also a big line of light coming through and it'll be slightly different I imagine on where you're seeing the reflection to where I'm seeing it. I've got it about here. And then underneath. I've got lots of darkness. Lots and lots of darkness. Now, if you're feeling really brave, you could continue this idea. Look, I'm holding my pot with my finger. So now my fingers can become part of our warm up exercise. So we've naturally moved on from simple observation of a easy subject, relatively easy, although the reflections aren't easy by any means. And then we're moving to definitely what is one of the world's hardest subjects. Drawing hands is really difficult. But just give yourself a bit of time and space, allow yourself mistakes. This is the perfect time. You warm up is the perfect time to make mistakes, challenge yourself, and perhaps even discover something Little knew about what skills you might not recognize you have. Again, simple hatching onto onto my fingers and my proverbial fingers on the page, and we can suddenly say, L, we've got quite a cool little sketch, and that is just warming up observation through using a simple object in front of us. 14. Brave Observations: Having done your first simple observational sketch, perhaps built it up in a slightly more complex way. You might want to then explore something quicker and more challenging. So what I suggest now is you try the same ideas, but do a continuous line and choose a more complicated object, something a little bit more scary. Allow yourself to make mistakes. But this will show you where you're perhaps needing to focus today. Sometimes our line quality is great, sometimes it's just not. If we have worked that out at the beginning, that's what we need to focus on today. It means that we prevent ourselves making obvious mistakes when it comes to producing our main project of the day. A fun exercise like this, do feel free to just repeat it. You know, these things could take seconds. And what we can do is we can move towards more complicated things. So here's me trying to capture my camera, but I'm going to do it this time with a quick continuous line. So this sort of puts a bit more pressure onto the observation skills. It means I'll definitely make more mistakes. The subjects more challenging. The way of drawing is more challenging. But It also helps just get that muscle memory in that flow. And it makes me discover, you know, what am I doing right today? What am I doing wrong? So perhaps here, when I've lost concentration on my scene, what I've lost a little bit is that light and loos line, this lines a lot bolder than this one. So that's good. I've used my warmup to discover a little flow in my drawing process today. And that means that I can correct it, or I can be aware of it rather than it being in my first drawing, the first important drawing of the day, then actually, it can be not in my first important drawing. It can just be a part of the warmup, something totally forgivable. And something that we can move past really easily. 15. SECTION THREE: And we're into the final section. In this section, we're making some thumb nails, and Thumbnails are small, little, thumb nail sized paintings, sketches, drawings. That represents something about our scene. Of course, when they're very small, they're not going to be perfect. So each of our thumb nails today is warming us up, focusing on a specific element of our scene. For me, I've got this fun light scene, which allows us to practice all these different aspects in a perhaps more unique or difficult scenario, which would be scary to jump straight into. And that's where these warm ups become so important. If you are out and about sketching today, if you're sketching still lives, if you're sketching rural scenes, I'd just suggest choosing a reference which fits the ideas that you want to warm up with. 16. Simplicity in Thumbnails: So thumb nail number one is all about simplicity in shapes. It's our first exploration of the scene. And it's where we're working everything out. By finding the shapes, we'll find the proportions, we'll find the perspective, and we'll find also the challenges, the bits where we struggle to make it accurate. Now, the last warm up exercises I'm going to suggest are thumbnails. And thumbnails are tiny sketches. So we're going to do three different thumbnails of one scene here. And this is how I will always warm up, especially if I'm outside, especially if the sen is challenging. I will always do some fumb nails, and Fu nails can have multiple different purposes. The first is going to be simplification. We can get to a s and we see it, and all we see is all the details. But everything can be broken down into those shapes, and we've already practiced our shapes, both two D and those three D shapes. That's exactly what we're going to do with our first. From now, we're going to work out where do we have cylinders? Where do we have squares? Where do we have pyramids, and where do we have cubes? And all of these shapes can suddenly build up into an actually pretty handy little warm up exercise. So to explore this idea, first, we have this rather interesting night scene. And it looks very scary. But when we start just looking around and finding simple shapes, be that spheres or circles, breaking it down into easy shapes. I know that this bit of the tower is not a cube, it's more complicated, but we can start by identifying it as a cube and identifying this as another cuboid. Underneath, we've got a series of triangles, which build up into something more complicated, series of rectangles and another triangle underneath. And just by finding these really simple shapes, not over complicating things, not trying to draw the entire scene all at once. What you'll find is you'll be able to draw the scene pretty quickly. The trick is not to over complicate the shapes, to really simplify to the max. This is a simple funnil. Just draw what you can see, not what you think you can see, but just draw what you can see. And before you know it, scary, complicated scenes will suddenly become a little bit clearer in your eye. And you'll be ready to perhaps even now, move on to start capturing it. Or we can do another little exercise, which will gain our confidence even more in producing this scene. 17. Value in Thumbnails: Next, we're going to work on value. Value is where we've built our hatching up in the first section, where we've added a three D shadow in our second section, and now it's all coming full circle. And it's really important, especially in the scene like this, but in all themes, to make it feel like there's light, to make it feel like there's darkness, to make it feel like a real place. We need to understand the value in our theme. So we've done our shapes, and everything's nice and simple. The next thing we need to look at is value. And value is the idea of light and dark. So we've got zero, one, two, three, four, and we build up all the way to if you want, five, which is going to be pure black. Even this though is more than we need, and we can actually start by thinking about our sketch in the sense of white or light, gray and black. If we take our C here, and we take advantage of our increased confidence to just draw it out again nice and quickly. This time, focusing really just on gaining confidence in those shapes, rather than trying to keep them too accurate. I, you might notice I'm drawing more of a silhouette this time. I'm not drawing all the shapes in between, I'm just drawing the simple silhouette. Now we can look around. If you squint at the image, or if you turn it into gray scale, you can suddenly see the values much easier. We can see that most of this is bright. But then we have gray here, don't we? We've got gray here, we've got gray in here, coming all the way around. We've got a little bit of gray just underneath the roof here and also all around here. Many of the roofs themselves though are much closer to black, so we can m not quite, but almost just block those in. And remember, here, I'm just trying to explore the image. Again, this is about observation. So this is not the neatest hatching in the world, and I wouldn't want to hatch this untidily or this scribbly in a finished image. But as a from there, where we're just seeking to gain our first ideas of where the dark light and grays are, then this, I think is a more than acceptable way of making the process nice and quick. Not overstressing yourself about getting it done and not spending hours equally if you really want to work when your hatching, What you might want to do is not do this. You might want to do that gentle, slow build up of hatching to get the process down as well. All I'm doing dotting around, moving around, finding those areas of light and dark and hoping that the seam will just come together through that. Instead of drawing all the lines, the sea will start to feel like the scam. Just through the exploration of light and dark. And I think, actually, it does. But there's one thing missing. And this is where the observation is really important. Because, look, the sky normally light today isn't. So we can practice just a little bit of tone in the sky. And if you're going to paint the sky, this is really important because you're going to need to recognize that the sky isn't light, the sky is a dark, deep blue. And you'll need to go paint accordingly. But it's also not super dark. So it's really important to just have worked through these things before you dive in with your finished sketch. And that's what warming up. Getting used to things is all about, and there we go. And that is number two, values, who we've gone shapes, value. Number three will be the most exciting yet. 18. Confidence in Thumbnails: And last but not least, this is what I do to boost my confidence in the scene, to make it more like my art and to see, H I really worked it out properly? So I'm going to just go for it with a continuous line sketch, add in a few textures, use a little bit of hatching, and then take a step back and see what it looks like. This again, shows me if I need to go back and study something else about the scene, or if I'm ready to risk it all in my final piece. So number three is where I'm really starting to gain a bit of confidence. What I want to do is explore a couple of things. Firstly, I'm going to do a continuous line, so a really quick, continuous line sketch, and that's going to let me know if I can get this nice and accurate with a continuous line, that I'm confident. So it's going to build my confidence from my scene. It's also going to show me where I make mistakes and where I need to concentrate more when I come to my finished version. The other thing is we can add on top of that our textures in a few places. So we can start identifying more details and textures as well as these big shapes and dark values. Like that, I'm just going to start showing my continuous line. Remembering everything we've been doing. This is about keeping the line light loose and character full agile. It's about finding little details this time as well, and dotting around the scene. Doesn't matter if we make mistakes because that's what this is about as well. It's about exploring our confidence with the scene, exploring where perhaps we need to concentrate work out something a little bit more. It might be I go terribly wrong here, and then what I need to do to come back and do a little bit more of the shape finding, a little bit more of the value finding or something else to just understand my scene a bit more. Coming down, we come to this last house here. And I'm adding in a few details as I move around as well. C find the texture, for example, of this grass. And then underneath this house, we have the windows, and I've got the windows in the wrong place. So that's something to note, isn't it? Coming along here. And I found another mistake as well. So I've got the number of position of the roofs a bit wrong. So that's useful tonight. Something for me to take note of when I do my next sketch, and to be able to correct now that I've worked that one out. Nice couple of windows here as well. And then there's little fun details. There's sort of clock faces here. We got windows coming down. And if I want, I can also just gently explore some of the tone and start considering the brick textures I might add in, are these bricks too much? Are they actually going to take away from my scene? And like that, my thumb nail is done. So we've done our three thumbnails all building up. And if I wanted to, I'd be ready now to move on to my final version of the scene. Now, in the next lesson, what I am going to do is show you a time lapse of me finishing this scene, creating it with ink word colors. But that's just for information. It's not the aim of this scene, but to give you a little idea of what you could do to move through all these warmups and then finish off with an amazing little project. 19. Timelapse for Inspo!: Now, today is all about warming up. It's not about creating a beautiful, finished work of art. In fact, I think these little warm up pages look pretty cool in and of themselves. However, I did want to just show you what I might do next. To this is a super quick time lapse of me taking the information we've used today, taking these warm ups, and applying them directly into your scene. So sit back relax. I'll talk you through what I'm doing. And if you want to take the next step, move through your warmups and create a scene by all means do. So you can see here initially, I'm building up my scene, using those shapes. This scene looks very similar initially to both that shape based scene, and also the silhouette that we did in our first two thumbnails. I'm finding, as well, the darkest areas. I identified quickly that for me, some of these windows were the darkest areas. Now I start thinking about the other areas of gray scale of value, and we use our hatching, some of the hatching in different directions, some of the hatching a little bit longer than I'm used to. All of this gradually building up the value. And I'm keeping lines light and loose. I'm keeping these three D orchard shapes, also light and loose. All of these things are things that we have practiced in our in our warm up. Now we didn't practice watercolors today because today was all about ink sketching, but you can still see here an attention to value, which has come from our thumb nailing. So the sky is not light, like it normally would be in a blue sky, in fact, I have to remember, it's a lot darker than some of the buildings. That's unusual. Similarly, we have to work lots of darkness into those areas where we've hatched. Though we've only warmed up with our pen and our ink perhaps our pencil. These same ideas are still having a huge impact on how I'm able to proceed with confidence in this painting phase. Again, applying really dark areas to my sketch and also more subtle midtone shadows on some areas. Notice I've also left really bold bits. Now, negative space is a really lovely technique to use. And although these areas are dark in our value, all these rooftops are bright white in my sketch, but dark in the real reference, you'll notice I've left them blank. And that, again, came from my warmups. It came from me practicing the scene and seeing what was going to give me the biggest punch and the most impressive or most durable work of art. 20. Final Thoughts: T hank you very much for joining me today. I hope you've enjoyed and found something a little bit interesting. I'm sure that you've all scribbled and made little marks before. But maybe in this class, you've uncovered the reasons why we might want to do that, and also discovered that there's actually some utility in it when we think about it. So instead of just scribbling with our pen at the very beginning, just getting that control and getting that grip, actually consciously thinking about these very simple things can really help us get off on the right foot when we start drawing and sketching. If you've enjoyed this class, do please leave me a review. I'd also love you to post your project in the class resources and Projects tab. I'll come back and leave a comment, give you some feedback, and of course, most importantly, some encouragement to keep creating. If you enjoy my classes in general, then don't forget you can follow me on SkillSha. I've got over 30 classes now, Loads of things where you could take these warmups and then take the next step. Most importantly, from this class, don't feel that you need to use every single warm up before every single sketch. That would be a very long and challenging process. That's not what this is about. This is about giving you a series of tools that you can use. To warm up before a given sketch, if you're feeling super confident, then maybe just do one simple exercise. If it's a challenging scene, then perhaps you choose two or three or four or five things to really get yourself worked up and ready to go.