I’m sure you’ve seen artists talk about warm up exercise and I’m here to be the obnoxious nerd to reiterate their point! Before every piece, even if it’s just me doing splines or skeletons or what not, I do at least a few dozen circles in a row with very low or no stabilization to refine the muscle memory.

I also catch myself accidentally drawing with my wrist. In order to minimize my dependency on that, I do an entire page of lines from one end of the canvas to the other, exclusively using my shoulder. It honestly helps to keep your wrist as a last ditch effort to get that one little connective line while all your confident sweeps are handled by the joints with the larger range of motion.

Nearly anything can be broken down into primitives and abstraction is basically what I’m trying to achieve. I’d call it x-ray vision, but that sounds dorky even for me! What I’m trying to get to is a point where I can see a fully rendered ANYTHING and see the components in my mind in much the same way as taking any 3D model into Blender or 3DSMax and run a shader that just reduces everything to component parts.

This is especially important for anatomy, which has been the bane of my existence these last few days…!