Saw a pro artist use a warm-up sketchbook before live streams and it made me think about my own process

I always just jumped straight into drawing on stream, but watching them do 15 minutes of quick gesture sketches first seemed to loosen up their line quality a ton, so has anyone else tried something like that and noticed a difference in their final pieces?

2 comments

2 Comments

gavin_knight391mo ago

15 minutes of quick gestures is a solid warmup but it's more about getting into a flow state than actually loosening your hand lol. The real trick is using your shoulder instead of your wrist for those big sweeping lines, warmups just force you to do that naturally. Your final piece will still suffer if you're not paying attention to that during the actual drawing though.

campbell.david29d agoOG Member

Have you ever noticed how everything in life works better when you ease into it first? Like, I used to just slam my car into drive and peel out in the morning and my engine always felt rough. Started letting it idle for a minute and it runs way smoother now. Same thing with my brain before a big decision, if I skip the slow thinking part I make dumb choices. So yeah, warmup sketches are just that same idea. You're basically telling your hand and your eyes "hey, we're gonna draw now, get ready" instead of just demanding they perform cold. It's like stretching before a run, you wouldn't sprint straight out of bed wearing tight jeans. The flow state thing is real too but I bet a big part of it is just not fighting your own muscles for the first ten minutes.