Chapter Three: Warm Ups and Drills
LESSON FOUR
Getting Started
To start, we are going to just fill in an entire page with lines. What I want you to focus on is the feeling and speed of your lines. To produce more fluid lines, it is important that you move at a moderate speed, meaning you aren’t moving too fast, or too slow. Lines that are made while drawing too fast can result in a total loss of control over the trajectory of your lines making it hard to hit your mark at the end of the stroke; while drawing too slowly usually results in wobbly, disorganized lines. Finding a medium speed that allows you to perform more confident lines is key.
It is important that you use a single stroke and perform each line in one fluid motion or you will be defeating the purpose. If, starting out, your lines are wobbly or inconsistent, that is fine, especially if you are new to these techniques. Your precision will develop in time. Once you finish a line, you can then decide what the issue probably was, such as moving too slowly, and simply try to make the next line a little bit better than the last. Patience and perseverance are your friend.
It is common for beginner artists to attempt one line in smaller, segmented lines resulting in scratchy or jagged results. This is a sign that you are drawing from your fingers or wrist instead of the elbow or shoulder because it is very hard to draw out more than one or two inches of a line at a time when you are drawing from the fingers and/or wrist. If you struggle with scratchy lines, go back to the previous page, Warming Up to review if you are drawing from your elbow and shoulder.
Exercise One
Draw lines from the very top of the page down to the bottom. Make them as long as possible while focusing on how the motion feels and paying attention to how fast you are moving. At this point it doesn’t really matter how straight or vertical your lines are - as long as they are fluid. Your accuracy and consistency will improve through the practice of some of the upcoming exercises.
You will want to leave some space between each line you draw so that you can go back in just a moment to insert more lines.
Once you’ve filled in the page with down strokes we are going to go in between the lines and fill in the empty space by drawing lines going from the bottom of the page up towards the top. You will want to compare the experience of drawing upstrokes that move away from your body, to the experience of drawing down strokes towards your body. How comfortable was it, and how easy did it feel to perform? You may want to repeat the process by going back and further filling in the spaces in between where possible. Again, remember to practice different pencil grips so that they also can be performed with more fluidity as well.
Now, using the same sheet of paper, as there is no reason to start a new one, we are going to draw lines from left to right. As you might of guessed, you will then go in and draw in new lines from right to left, filling up the spaces in between. Compare the experience. Again, you may want to repeat the process by going back and further filling in any blank spaces between.
This exercise provides us with a few lessons, the most basic being which directions are easiest to draw towards as you can further utilize these strokes to achieve your most confident lines. Secondly, over time you will increase your ability to draw consistently straight and consistently spaced lines which will aid in creating beautiful cross hatching and textures down the line.
Learn what direction is most comfortable and creates a quality line.
Not everyone can create a perfect line in every direction, so line drawing exercises can help you to determine which directions are easiest for you and help you to create quality lines. It also gives you an opportunity to practice lines in every direction, and with different pencil grips, that are uncomfortable, or inaccurate for you.
