In this section, we will focus on our ability to draw lines accurately and with intent.

In the past, I often started the day with dexterity exercises. Do not skip these initially!

Later on, you can do them while you are drawing. Nowadays, I typically do these dexterity exercises while inking an illustration.

These exercises are meant to be used as warm-up exercises, so do them before you do the exercises in the chapters ahead. Change them up a bit by switching from one dexterity exercise to another.

It pays enormous dividends if you do these exercises for a while: you become much better at placing lines exactly where you want them.

Another benefit is that you can also do them without reference; you can do them at any moment you have a few free minutes and a sketchbook with you.

An additional benefit is that they are chosen so that you can immediately see for yourself how well you did. They are, in essence, self-referential. If you, for example, practice drawing parallel lines, then it becomes very obvious very quickly if one line is not quite parallel to another line.

The dexterity exercises are a part of the Morning Sketches APP ; the APP initially starts every day with a warm-up exercise, and in the beginning, it is a dexterity warm-up exercise. Later, when you did warm-ups long enough, you progress onto drawing three-dimensional forms as a warm-up, but more on that later.

Below, I will describe some drawing warm-up exercises I collected over the years. I highly recommend you try them out because they are helpful! The benefits are:

1. You can start drawing quite quickly; there is no need to search for reference inspiration. Just pick up a pencil, pen, and paper, and go! You do not need much to get started with these exercises.
2. Before I start drawing, I must slow down and shut off that blabbermouth inside my head, constantly criticizing everything I do.

3. When I start, this blabbermouth asks me why I am drawing. “It goes so slow! Why do this,” it will keep saying.

   After doing these exercises for ten to twenty minutes, I get into the flow. I arrive at a meditative state where I enjoy making each mark on the paper and feel like continuing.

4. These exercises improved my ability to place lines as intended.
5. One very cool aspect of the drawing exercises I will describe below is that you can easily see if you make a mistake. When drawing from observation, for example, you might accidentally get perspective or proportions wrong without noticing. Not so with the exercises below! Your mistakes will be in your face.

For the exercises below, try focusing on drawing just this one line. Put all your effort into getting that line precisely right. Draw as if it is the only line you will draw that day. Try to get it exactly right. What helps me is to apply a light touch and imagine that I am painting lightly with the pen. I got this idea while watching artists ink art in real-time, and I could see how they carefully crafted each line. Such lines don’t have to be tight! You can rehearse a line (see the Ghosting exercise below) until you can place it confidently with one fluent stroke.

Slow down for more accuracy; you’ll still be training your muscle memory. It works for me to look ahead of the pen to where it will be a second from now. When I look at where it will be shortly, my ability to move it there improves quite a bit.

If you find one specific aspect difficult, practice it more. For example, freehand drawing straight horizontal lines is difficult for me, so it would be a good idea for me to practice that more.

And now for the exercises.

I often like to start with this drawing exercise as a warm-up: put down a point and then draw straight lines from another point on the page to that point. Draw these lines from several different angles without rotating the page! The point is to practice moving your hand from various angles.

Why is this important? After all, you can rotate your page if you want. But rotating your page pulls you out of your concentrated state. Also, it could be impractical to draw on large sheets. And if you are drawing for a video, the constant rotating will give the viewer vertigo. But rotating pages is not forbidden! There are no rules in art.

You will notice that you are better at placing lines under certain angles and less good at placing lines at other angles. This is probably due to control of your elbow and shoulder. I draw with my left hand and find it easy to draw straight lines from bottom right to top left, but this might be different for you.

Start by grabbing a pen. No pencil, because the goal is to draw lines correctly in one go. No erasing! You get better faster if you use a pen and force yourself to be careful with each line. This is the best for this exercise: you really don't want to be able to erase. The whole point is to notice where you were off and figure out why.

And grab some paper. Any paper goes; we’re not making art here.

Put a little circle with a white dot on the page, and start drawing lines from any angle.

Draw toward the white dot, not away from it. The goal is to practice targeting a specific point.

Use a small circle with a white dot, because if you use a black dot, you won't be able to see it after you have placed many lines toward that dot. With the little white dot, you can keep seeing whether you aimed right.

If you find one angle more challenging, practice just that angle. In that case, it can be a good idea to rotate the page so that you can keep practicing that specific angle, drawing lines to the same point under the same angle.

You can see when you make a mistake, e.g., when the line is not straight or doesn’t arrive at the endpoint as intended.

Draw slowly. That allows you to draw with more control while also still training your muscle memory. I let my eye follow the direction the pen needs to go, so I look ahead to where the pen will be a second later.

Do this for a few minutes every day as a warm-up before you start drawing.

Open Line To Point in Morning Sketches APP

Draw a straight line. You can choose long or short lines, and long lines will be more challenging. You can see if a line is straight by looking past the page.

Then, draw parallel lines next to it, one after the other. You can see when it isn’t placed precisely parallel, as the space between the lines will become smaller or bigger and be visible.

Try doing this in various directions without rotating the page. Find out which angles are harder and practice those more.

Now, draw two somewhat parallel lines. They don’t have to be straight for this exercise. Then, draw a line from a point on the one line, starting exactly on the line, to a point on the other line, stopping exactly on the other line without overshooting or undershooting. Then, draw lines parallel to it, starting and stopping exactly on the lines from one line to the other.

Bonus points for practicing this by drawing the parallel lines in a direction you found you had problems with in the Line To Point exercise.

You can also use the lines already created by the other exercises for this one.

Draw a curved line on a page. Then, trace that line with your pen or pencil in the air, imagining putting it down. When you feel confident you got it, you can trace over the original line on the paper. Again, you can see if you got it wrong; the lines will not cover each other exactly.

When making a drawing, it helps to imagine the line on the paper and then trace that imagined line with your pen to get the line you intended.

You can also ghost lines already on the page, lines resulting from the other exercises.

Open Ghosting Lines in Morning Sketches APP

I got this surprisingly useful warm-up exercise from Watts atelier. It involves drawing circles and ellipses, big and small.

It is surprising how often you need to draw a perfect circle or ellipse, and it’s just a useful skill. And, again, with this exercise, you can see when you are off. You can easily tell when something isn’t a perfect circle or ellipse. Usually, the internal symmetries are broken, and you notice.

This idea comes from Peter Han’s Dynamic Sketching course. You can draw longer straight lines and then draw circles and ellipses between these lines so that they precisely touch each other and the lines. This helps improve your ability to place the circles and ellipses precisely.

This idea comes from Llyn Hunter: draw spirals to get your hand into the right motion to draw circles and ellipses.

To see what ellipses look like, you can look at a cylindrical object. Hold it in your hand, rotate it around, and notice how the circular end caps turn into ellipses.

You can also look at the 3D model of circles in space here:

Draw directly in pen to force yourself to be accurate. You have to, you can’t erase. The goal isn’t a perfect piece of art but rather to improve your skills.

Draw slowly. You will be more accurate while still training your muscle memory.

Circles and ellipses are incredibly useful to practice as you need them surprisingly often for cylinder-like forms. You can find 3D model of cylinders here:

Open Circles And Ellipses in Morning Sketches APP

If you've been doing the above dexterity exercises for a while, you don’t have to keep doing them explicitly; you can continue doing them as you create illustrations and finished pieces. For example, ghosting lines is something you can keep practicing while you draw. Also, aiming lines at a point is something you can keep practicing. Drawing slowly to train your muscle memory, looking just past the pen point to where the pen point will be in a second, are all things you can practice while making a regular drawing.

This is a great drawing warm-up to try out a new pen or to improve your cross-hatching.

Draw a grid of squares, each around one inch by one inch, and start filling them with different textures and tones.

You can also make longer rectangles and fill them with one texture, changing the tone from darker to lighter.

As an additional exercise, you can also wrap the textures you came up with around a three-dimensional form.

Open Textures in Morning Sketches APP

I am ready for a real drawing when my mind isn’t resisting this exercise and enjoying the mark-making.

Rotate through the warm-ups mentioned above and do them for a few minutes to half an hour every day.

You will initially feel resistance. Keep doing these exercises at least until your brain stops telling you it wants to stop. When you're in the flow, that can be the right time to move from the warm-up to working on the thing you want to work on.

That completes my current go-to list of dexterity warm-up exercises.

To be clear, these are by no means the only possible warm-up exercises! There are also warm-up exercises that help you loosen up, or that jog your creativity. Some artists don’t even warm up at all. The exercises above might not be what you need, and you need to assess that for yourself.

The above exercises helped me immensely and could help you, too.

The Morning Sketches APP provides reference images, organizes everything, and schedules all the exercises in this course for you.

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