the SUPER BENEFICIAL step most artists skip

Whether you’re an athlete, a musician, or an artist, it’s undeniable that warming up is SO beneficial for your practice. But it’s a step many artists (including myself!) often skip. We want to jump right into creating, but our hands and fingers are stiff and our minds are void of any ideas. There are many different ways to warm up your drawing hand and open up your imagination, but one of my favorite ways is with quick gesture sketches. I chatted a bit in last week’s newsletter about this practice!

This is what my warm-up looks like.

1. Grab my messy sketchbook

2. Pull up fun reference photos on Pinterest

3. Set a one-minute timer

4. SKETCH THE POSE!

I like to fill a whole page with these, typically around 8-10 poses. I keep it loose and gestural, focused on simply warming up and finding the feeling of the pose.

So, what is this good for? How does this BENEFIT my practice?

1. It warms up my drawing hand. It helps me get comfortable with the pen or pencil in my hand and helps me loosen up.

2. It helps me learn how to draw more natural and dynamic poses. Each new gesture sketch helps me build a mental library of poses I can draw from imagination.

3. It helps me get comfortable with failure. These quick sketches aren’t pretty and a lot of them are actually fairly gross. But doing a lot of them helps me remember that practice makes PROGRESS not PERFECTION. These quick sketches remind me that when you fail at one sketch, you can always start a new one.

4. It sparks new ideas. In some cases, a certain pose is so inspirational that it sparks a new illustration idea for one of my own characters!

If you’ve been struggling to get into your creative practice lately, try starting with a warm-up like this one. Commit to 10 minutes of warm-ups, and see where it leads. It’s incredible what happens when we simply show up for our creativity.