Original subtitles

Welcome to model 2 and at the start of this module we're going to be doing warmup and penmanship training.

I'm going to show you a warm up exercise that is really designed to help you improve your penmanship.

How you basically draw lines, and how you can basically get a good way to loosen up, draw with your arm.

And it's great exercise, you can do it digitally you can do traditionally; it doesn't really matter.

So let's get right into it.

So the first stage of this, is to really just draw a page of circles. And notice how fast I'm drawing

them. I'm keeping my wrist kind of locked, and using my arm and my elbow to draw these.

So all you have to do is basically say "OK let me draw circles without moving my wrist." And I also want

you to pay careful attention to how loose I'm being. You can see that here and here and here and all these

areas, the circles don't necessarily close properly.

Now, you want to strive to have good, perfect circles, as perfect as possible. But not at the expense of

drawing slowly.

Right.

Or anything like that.

We don't want to draw slowly.

We don't want to do anything like that.

Right.

So, just be very loose, lock your wrist, and move your arm and do a page of circles.

I'll try and be as perfect as I can here.

Alright.

And what I'll often do, is just put circles in them circles smaller circles. Not using my wrist. Once again:

Don't use your wrist.

So that's what we want to do as the first exercise. Add a new layer or get a new page, and what we want to

do after that is draw some ellipses.

Now what is an ellipse?

An ellipse is a circle that if rotated slightly is now in perspective.

Right.

So it's basically still the same circle, it's the same little, let's pretend it's a dish for example, but

we just rotate it in perspective. That's what an ellipse is.

And you know your ellipses are good, if you can cut them down the middle here.

This is called the minor axis, for you theory nerds out there.

I was going to type minor theory. I mean, Minor axis

Right.

If you cut it through the middle, on the minor axis, the major axis is not important to us, that

would be cutting it vertically, and you're able to fold one side over the other.

And they match fairly well or perfectly, right.

This one's pretty OK. And also a point to note, just a side note, the minor axis will always point to a

vanishing point in perspective.

If you know a lot about perspective right.

Nevertheless, what we want to do is a page of ellipses, and just kind of get that arm motion of drawing

ellipses.

And you can vary the degree of the ellipse- that is the spacing in between the ellipse.

What degree of rotation is happening to the circle.

So you can do very thin little ellipses or you can try to do bigger ellipses. The whole thing

is to ensure that both sides really are the same as each other.

And what you can do after you've done a page of ellipses, is just run through and check them

and just put a tick or a cross

if you felt it was a good ellipse or a bad ellipse. That one's not super good.

This one is reasonable. This one is reasonable. Too bad. This one's OK.

That one is bad.

And once again I want to reinforce this: just be loose, physically loose in your arm right now.

The lesson coming up called "looseness and dynamism" will really go in depth as to what it means to be

loose, in terms of physically loose in your arm.

So that is coming up.

But nevertheless, I want you guys to start doing the warm up exercises already.

Right. Not super good on the ellipses, no big deal it's just a warm up exercise.

All right.

The next thing that you guys should do on the warm up exercise and penmanship training, is really draw

straight lines. As straight as you can, freehand, very quickly, not slowly at all, and try and keep them as

parallel as possible.

This is especially useful when you're trying to do obviously straight lines in your work, if you're doing

any kind of industrial design drawing.

And I would just generally do this a couple of times, top to bottom, bottom to top, just doing my best,

putting the lines in very quickly.

You can see how quickly I'm drawing this. Locking my wrist and trying to get as straight a line as possible.

You can see here I kind of veer, the lines are not perfectly parallel.

They taper a little bit, tapering, tapering. They're kind of converging, heading to converge somewhere, but

it's a great exercise.

And I'd probably just do about three pages; two or three pages where I'm just constantly training

my arm, moving it quickly, and you'll see the more you get it and the more you focus, the better you get as time

goes by. I usually do one of these entire exercise workflows, warmup exercises, in about five minutes

just before I start drawing. It helps to really loosen up the arm because getting nice smooth lines

really requires a looseness; a physical looseness.

OK.

And then last but not least, is the point to point exercise. The point to point exercise really is, you put

about six or seven dots on the page, and what you want to try and do is, ghost the line if you have to, (Let me make

the cursor a little bit bigger here so you can see) to kind of, you want to try and have a straight shot,

a straight as line as possible, joining these two points together.

And so I ghost the line, basically I don't draw I kind of just hover my hand to try and make the shot

and then try and go for it.

Didn't quite hit it, but the line is pretty nice and straight.

And then I'll try the next one.

Now if you're on paper, feel free to rotate the page, photoshop you can hit R

And, you can then rotate the page like that. I find that I draw straight lines reasonably accurately

from bottom to top.

Ghosting trying to hit it

so here I'll ghost this one as well.

OK.

Hit it.

But I overshot a little bit, but the line is fairly straight and the overshoots are't the end of the world. You're

really just trying to train yourself to draw very straight lines.

That one is pretty reasonable right.

So in summary, the workflow for the warm up and penmanship training, and I recommend you do this every

day before you start to draw, is do a page of circles very loosely, a page of ellipses very loosely.

Don't forget to measure them down the middle to check the accuracy, a page of lines, straight lines or

two or three pages if you wish if you're pretty quick at it.

And then a single page of point to point, where you want to connect the lines together with as straight

line as possible. Connect the points together with a straight line as possible.

That's the end of this lesson.

Let's move on to the next lesson.