The importance of doing warming up drawing before drawing session.
As an artist, I have pretty much drawn almost every day for the last 15 to 20 years. There is this common theme to my art practices. And that is, when i work on a piece of art, I feel stiff and scatter brained at the very start of the session. At the very beginning I feel like I’ve forgotten how to draw. It almost feels like l’m jumping into a cold pool and adjusting to the temperature of the water. I start to work on the main art piece of the day, and sometimes things don’t turn out the way I want them.
About a portion of the way in, my inner mind is begging to activate again, and I start to remember how to draw better. I start to get in a flow and finally draw all the way that I meant to.
The incident I just mentioned is something that I repeated for the first couple of years. I never really knew why I felt it happened or what was going on. I always thought it was just a natural fact of drawing in general. I never really saw a way out of starting my drawing sessions weak.
Around a year into my drawing learning, I started incorporating warm ups into my art practice. This was after every teacher and tutorial had been begging me to do this. Once I tried it, I realized this is what I should have been doing for years prior and that is to do warm-up before every single session.
There were really two things I was warming up. The muscles in my arm, and the mind. For my hand, even though my brain had what it needed in the moment, I knew what to draw. The hand isn’t cooperating and the lines seem a lot more robotic or shakey. And conversely, sometimes I felt like the mind is drawing more of a blank than normal. This mismatch made me feel like I had kind of lost touch with my skill. At this stage, I could understand how someone would quit at this point and just feel like they’ve lost their passion for a little bit.
Drawing is like any other skill in the sense that warmups improve the main performance. You have to wake up the motor controls, the rhythm and the flow in the practice. And that’s where warmups come in to prime your hand eye coordination. Also, it helps your mind clean itself out and or get started. I started incorporating these into my practice and my drawings shot way up in quality. I wasn’t spending those cold first 30 minutes making mistakes on the actual art piece, and then going back and having to fix it.
There are warmups for beginners and warmups for intermediate artists.
I used to think that my skills were just waning toward the beginning of the drawing session but I found out it wasn’t really true.
When you first start off and if you’re brand new to drawing in general, the warmup is gonna get your hand and eye working together. This itself is great. It’s gonna warm those muscles in your hand that maybe you weren’t using for the entire duration of the day or week. But at some point when you are an intermediate in drawing, it’s going to be a very big point in bringing to surface the information that you already knew but you’re bringing back up to your thoughts. You want to make the wise knowledge you have usable and that’s what warmups end up doing.
How to do warmups. I would say there are many different exercisesyou could do as far as doing warmups. Let’s start with the first and most basic.
Draw anything for 30 minutes. And you have to do this in pen. I want you to grab a separate sheet of scratch paper and I want you to kind of doodle anything that’s on your mind or look at something and just do that. As you start drawing I don’t want you to think. You could think if you like a little bit.
But what I want you to do is have an instinct and I want you to start drawing anything that again comes to your mind’s eye or something that inspires you in the moment. Something always to keep in mind though is that this particular drawing will not matter. You can definitely save this if you’d like, but in general, I tend to do these on loose leaf piece paper so that I can just throw them away afterward.
You just want the experience of the motion and you want the random little instinctive thought processes that come to surface in your head. In some ways, you also want this to unclog anything that you might have. You might have a certain idea that’s floating around in the back of your subconscious that comes out in this paper. Just anything you’d like. I tend to draw many separate little images and then that’s one way you could do it.
Number two. This is an exercise that I also do repeatedly and that is to leave your hand sitting on the paper and then continuously draw things, but without lifting your pen. This is gonna create a bit of scrambled images. And I want you to have almost the exact same thing as the last one except you’re not lifting your pen so you’re completely just scribbling around images and you’re gonna see almost roar shack patterns that you might be able to use for other projects later on if you do decide to save any of these. But it’s incredibly important that you just draw from instinct. That’s gonna save a whole lot of mess.
Number three. This is another one I do a lot is just take a loose leaf sheet of paper and you start drawing circles and cubes on it. This gets your structural part of your brain kicking in. A big portion of drawing is drawing structure and keeping things in balance. This is gonna do a couple of those things. The circles tend to be very good for my shoulder as far as my arm and shoulder and then the physical portion of drawing. The squares get my mind into thinking in 3-D again and seeing the images that I want in my mind Eye.
This is super vital.
What these exercises do is they prep you and they hone your skills so that you’re gonna get way more out of your actual drawing session. The actual drawing session is where the learning begins and where things grow entirely so really keep in mind that area is more important than anything else. The worm is just like a fun routine and something to really keep in mind is that you need to start making this a habit.
So what is a habit per se. What we’re talking about here is something that you do automatically without thought. We start doing something for the very first time. It has to take mental energy and thought to actually get yourself to do the actual task, especially if it’s something that’s out of the norm. When we do that, it kind of uses up a little bit of his mental bandwidth that we have.
Overtime, if you have a certain task, you’re gonna start using less and less energy to get started on that particular task. Until eventually, it’s gonna become strange if you don’t do that particular task.
That’s the way that the warmups work. I find it strange to even start my drawing without warming up.
It’s something that’s so ingrained and so automatic it takes literally no thought to begin and no mental endurance to start. It’s just something that I start and continue to have a great successful time with. This is where you wanna be. You wanna be actually having a fun time with your warmups.
When you reach this stage, you have a new habit.
Final thoughts
Warmups are not even an extra add-on. Warmups are actually the foundation of your drawing practice. It should be something that you do without much thought. In all honesty, you should actually start feeling strange when you don’t warm up beforehand and it reels a little bit odd like you’re missing something. These worms will help you grow in your art skill and ways that you never really thought you imagined.
It’s gonna flow so much quicker. Your entire drawing session and practice is gonna go so much smoother because of this. So enjoy the warmups push yourself to a level that you’ve never been before and we’re gonna be in an amazing journey together.
If you wanna see the exact drawing practices and warmups that you can do go check out the other page here while it’s gonna have beginner lessons and it’s gonna have a lot more that is gonna push your mind to new levels.
