I’ve heard many times that sketchers should warm up. I suppose there’s a number of ways to do it. You could draw circles, do a bunch of hatching, maybe draw some thumbnails, or do a few quicksketches. I’ll be honest, I don’t do it. Too lazy I guess.
As part of my March “biding my time til spring” regime, I went to one of the malls with the idea of drawing people. These were quick sketches, of course, as people in malls are on the move. They might stop for a minute but that’s a “long pose” in mall time. What I noticed was that as I quick sketched people, my sketches got better (subjective assessment). Maybe it was the McDonalds coffee but I have to think that it may have been due to becoming warmed up. I’ll let you decide:
Page one:
This page definitely suffers from proportion problems, lots of errant lines, etc. I don’t judge them too harshly as each figure took no more than 20-30 seconds, but…
Page 2:
These seem a bit better but that guy in the middle really looks weird. He was very tall so maybe I just got carried away.
Page 3:
This is the third page I did and, in my opinion, they’re not bad at all. Maybe I was warmed up. Maybe I was just lucky. I still find that drawing people so quickly is really tough. There’s no time for assessing much of anything. I just keep the pen moving. What do you think? Do you warm up?
I absolutely think warming up helps. Not that I do it consistently 😉 , but I always think of my first sketch of the day as the “throwaway pancake” (or it ends up being the throwaway, whether I think of it that way or not). In life drawing sessions, it’s especially apparent. No matter how often I go, the 1-min. poses at the beginning of the session are very rough compared to the 1-min. poses later.
– Tina
“Throwaway pancake” 🙂 Maybe I should start carrying a scribble pad for warm up purposes. — Larry