Excercises to warm up the sketch muscles...

I was looking over the shoulder of a friend doing while he was rendering and watched him do a page or two of smooth, parallel lines on letter sized paper before he dove in… He’s a fantastic sketcher and the quick warm up seemed to make his lines much more accurate and confident

Sketching and doodling aside, does anyone else have a warm up excercise that they do before a sketch session?

A professor of mine demonstrated a rather effective warm up excersize called “shooting the bird”. Basically, you take your sheet of paper (the larger the better) and very quickly tap your pencil on the paper to make one point, then tap it somewhere else on the page to make another point and immediately connect the two points with a quick line. Repeat this until you’ve filled up at least two pages and you should be nice and loosened up.

I’ve always liked how got me to draw with quickness and confidence in my lines.

Concentric circles. The straight lines get pretty easy quickly. Trying to do circles and having each interior one still be relatively round and all at the same center is hard. But it works on your accuracy in a lot of different ways, just try it, you’ll see. I’ll do a few pages a day if I’m not busy, it’s really got my accuracy on all different types of linework up a lot.

Thanks guys, this is exactly the kind of exercises I was hoping to hear about

Sky, my buddy was doing the same exercise… shooting the bird. good one

Skinny, The concentric circles are hard! I can completely see how that can help. Curves are much harder and are way more impressive when you have good control…

There was one other thing that coworker mentioned - he did that same exercise with the parallel lines across the page, and he would try to vary the lineweight the whole way down the page… thick thin thick thin… very hard one to do and keep the line straight

One of my profs said everyday when he woke up he went to his studio before he did anything and sketched the first thing he thought of. He always believed the first sketch of the day stunk so he wanted to get it out of the way first thing…

I’m addicted to drawing 3 point cubes…while I’m trying to solve a problem I doodle away drawing lots of them from different angles. I also draw some large ellipse over lapping each other then try and turn it in to some product/vehicle.

a great exercise i used to do in school was based on perspective cubes. you draw a horizon line on the page and try to draw cubes anywhere on the page in the correct perspective relative to the horizon, quickly. up or below the horitzon, left or right of center. very hard, but great for learning perpective and quick sketching techniques.

R

i never “warmup” i am always on!!! seriously though, i remember someone answered this question saying that they would quickly sketch out something that they were confident they could do quickly and accurately a couple of times to get loose, i thought that was a cool way to get started up…

i recommend doing some calisthenics and some light cardiovascular exercises, no weights though (will result in many a broken lead) hey might as well get in proper shape…