When I included pencil drawing as a daily habit in my schedule, I noticed something that totally changed my art practice. You might have noticed it at least once too, and that’s how the first sketches and drawings you make usually look pretty meh and it gets better along the way. That is exactly why you need to add these drawing warm-up exercises to your creative routine.
Why include warm-up exercises in your routine?
Warming up sharpens your focus and gets your hand used to translate what’s in your mind.
For how long should you warm up?
You can warm up for 5 minutes before your drawing sessions, or if you feel like your hands aren’t as familiar with drawing yet, take it up to 10 minutes.
Notes to help you choose the right warm-up exercise for your routine
- Keep it simple, not too challenging and complex.
- Choose an exercise that helps connect your mind and muscles at the same time.
- Do a succession of short easy exercises to fall into the act of drawing comfortably.
1– Drawing warm-up 1: Practice straight lines
For this drawing warm-up exercise, mark two points on your paper and try to connect them with a straight line.
Make sure you keep your line as straight as it can get. Repeat the same thing over and over at different angles until your hand is able to draw a perfectly straight line. If you are an artist who practices art daily, your muscle memory will be very good, so your hands will draw a straight line from the very first try.
2- Drawing warm-up 2: Move on to 2D shapes
Choose a basic geometric or organic shape and start drawing it in repetition, changing the size of the shape every time.
If you pick to draw a geometric shape, try your best to get it right every time. The bigger the shape, the harder it is to make it accurate.
3- Drawing warm-up 3: 3D shapes
Start with drawing a box, then work your way to drawing many boxes alternating sizes, perspectives, and shapes.
4- Drawing swirls
This is a nice warm-up exercise because swirls aren’t very usual. If you take a line, a square, a circle, and even 3D geometric shapes, our minds are pretty used to them and we kinda draw them with no effort (unless you choose a challenging perspective). Swirls on the other hand are pretty fun, refreshing to draw, and give your shoulder a nice movement to brush the stiffness off.
5- Draw spheres
This is my go-to drawing warm-up exercise. I often draw human figures, portraits, or real-life scenes and I have noticed throughout my practice that spheres are the shape that gets most repetitive in real-life scenes. Faces are spheres in the base, bodies, and trees are spheres as well and so many more objects could be cut down into spheres in drawing. That makes this warm-up exercise a great quick intro and practice to actual drawing.
6- Draw cuts in 3D shapes
This is the last exercise on this list because it’s a pretty challenging one, and I don’t recommend it to beginners. However, practice should get slightly tougher as we master basic techniques so we can keep improving.
This goes especially for the artists trying to master drawing from imagination. At first, it won’t be easy to draw shapes with cut-out pieces, but the more you practice, the easier it gets.
7- Drawing exercises to build muscle memory
To finish this list of drawing warm-up exercises, draw a row of shapes the way you would usually draw them, and then go backward. It feels absolutely weird, it’s like drawing with your less dominant hand and you will see that the shapes look weird as well. The more you practice drawing a shape in different ways, the more muscle memory you build.
I have a whole article on muscle memory building and how to use it to draw from your imagination that you don’t want to skip.
Conclusion
Hope you enjoyed this list of drawing warm-up exercises! Do not overlook your warm-ups, it is extremely important to train your hands and mind to the actual act of mark-making before you move to draw an actual artwork.
Enjoy creating <3
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