being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager
and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five
someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help
me: my what
What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.
when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much.
Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential.
So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’
1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust!
2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:
a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it!
In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support.
I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose
b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me!
c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface
d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)
e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them
f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics.
g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper.
h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more.
And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc.
This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah.
Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.
so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings!
How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense
elon musk is literally like a parody. like he cant genuinely fucking be like this like bro is on some satirical depiction of a spoiled rich kid type shit. like hes a cartoon evil rich guy. throwing tantrums bc someone criticized him or said they didnt like him. spending billions of dollars to buy an app and then changing the app every time someone uses a feature of the app to insult him or hurt his feefees. dude straight up does the cartoon steam blowing out of ears train whistle shit irl every time someone says anything mean to him or is transgender but whats terrifying is he has enough money to do anything he wants and millions of chuds who would gladly no homo suck his cock every night before he goes to bed. like. how has someone come to be like this. why has this been allowed to happen why was he created
i think most rich guys are actually more like elon than they aren’t, they all have simpering fanclubs online but enough haters to keep them up at night. i’ve seen a good half-dozen “richest man in X country” instagram accounts litigating their personal beef with some obscure shitposter who won’t stop trolling them. they run the world but everyone doesn’t love them so they’re not happy
this is the richest guy in africa and his mortal enemy, a bored brazilian man
An important message to heterosexuals, listen carefully: you do not, and I repeat do NOT, have to marry someone you actively dislike, don’t enjoy spending time with and/or whose hobbies you despise. You do not have to do that!! stop doing that!!!
“hahaha I hate my wife and made an entire room of the house dedicated to evading her company”
“hahaha I hate my husband and I drink industrial quantities of wine to cope with having had kids with him”
did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”
This is especially funny because they aren’t even right. Foxes *ARE* dogs.
As a lesbian, it’s happened twice already that one “guy” stands out to me and I think “huh maybe they’re kinda cute and interesting, I wanna get to know them” and then I get to know them better and it’s a closeted trans girl who I somehow sniffed with my little nonbinary lesbian nose
IT JUST HAPPENED FOR A THIRD TIME!!!!
You guys will never believe what just happened to me
What does it mean if every “man” I’ve been attracted to was actually a trans woman? Idk what this says about my sexual orientation but it does mean I have astounding egg-dar
Gays being able to detect trans people of our preferred gender and being able to feel preemptive attraction to them is a phenomenon I was not aware extended to people beyond me
wish you guys would hate norway for the intense medical transphobia the way you hated swedes for not feeding people. we couldnt get a legal gender marker change without forced sterilisation until 2016. theres 1 board in 1 hospital in the whole country that’s allowed to give HRT and they go by 1950s gender roles (i.e. if you’re a trans man who wears nail polish, or a trans woman who wears pants, or you’re gay, you’re denied), and there’s a minimum of a full year of psychological evaluations before any treatment is given (they ask helpful and relevant questions like “did you play with cars or dolls as a child” and “do you think about your parents when you masturbate”). anyway burn down rikshospitalet
[ID: tumblr tags that read #i hope im not deflecting when i say this happens in other countries as well #i’m german and it’s basically the same here. forced chemical sterilization was required to change your gender marker until 2011 #and if self-id doesn’t pass we will continue to have to put up with insane amounts of medical gatekeeping #it’s disgusting and dehumanizing and i need more people to talk about this #it’s a widespread issue that countries that have a rep for being progressive don’t get criticized enough. end ID]
you’re absolutely not deflecting, this is super important. so many european countries claim equality and good healthcare while also actively killing trans populations with medical neglect and gatekeeping.
we are being murdered by our governments. they are refusing us life saving medical care. we NEED more people to talk about this
hey so this is simultaneously the best and worst reply you could have ever made to my post
[ID 1: Tumblr comment by @wam0109: Obviously. Where else would he store the wine?
ID 2: Tags that say: #ah… so that’s why they’re called jugs…
ID 3: A screenshot of the wikipedia article for Dionysian Mysteries. A big red stamp reading “solved” in all caps has been superimposed on the page at an angle. end IDs.]
life on earth isn’t all too bad but I’d be lying if i said i wouldn’t leave in a heartbeat if it meant i could be some woodland creachure in a fantasy setting
