#199 - Drawing And ... Competitive Swimming

I have been competitive swimming for a few months now. Water resistance is around 800 times as strong as air resistance, so it is very important to reduce water friction if you want to swim faster. Reduce friction and increase propulsion.

This is all technique more than strength.

And it’s in the small things! Tilt your head down, thrust your hand into the water 20 centimeters under, and paddle with the legs slightly so that you float horizontally—not too much, or you will be out of breath. For propulsion, your arm needs to move so that it displaces as much water as possible horizontally.

The problem is that you can not see yourself and what you’re doing wrong. For that, a coach who stands by the side is helpful. They can see what you are doing wrong and can give pointers.

When learning to draw, that can be useful, too. You often don’t see your mistakes in your work, and an outsider can point them out to you. You would eventually have seen these, but having someone else point them out makes you grow much faster.

They also have exercises called “drills,” which involve doing an exercise that focuses on just one small part of the complex technique you are trying to master. The drill is designed to help you feel what it feels like when you do the motion right.

One example drill is to make a sound through your mouth when your head is underwater. This forces you to breathe out at that point, precisely what you need to do. Your lungs need to get rid of the carbon dioxide early, or you will be out of breath. Then, when you turn your body, you breathe in. That simple act of making a sound out of your mouth forces you to breathe out while your head is still down, and it lets you feel how it feels if you are doing that part of the complex technique correctly.

One of the cool things about these drills is that pros, including Olympic medalists, still do them.

I love these exercises that anyone can do, from beginner to pro level.

You can do the same drills Olympic swimmers do and do swimming training.

You can use the same routines that winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature used to write: read a lot, write a lot, and experience life. Alice Munro did that, and you can too.

You can use the same drawing practice Kim Jung Gi did: draw a lot, from memory, scenes around him from observation, and later from memory. Kim Jung Gi did that, and so can you, starting today, starting now.

Beginners and pros alike can do these routines and improve over time.

It is part of why I like the memory drawing exercises and art flashcards. You can do them at each skill level and get something out of them. Kim Jung Gi kept doing memory drawing exercises, and you and I can do simpler versions of that exercise.

The YouTube channel brokendraw came out with this gem of a YouTube video: 25 Essential Drawing Exercises: Unlock your Imagination .

The 25 exercises he mentions focus on small parts of the complex skill level of drawing forms convincingly in space. You can do them at any skill level.

They are like the drills we do at competitive swimming training but for drawing!

I decided to add a few to the warm-up drawing drills on the Practice Drawing This website. Credit goes to him, of course.

You can find the first ones here:

4 Drawing Exercises To Help You Transition From 2D To 3D

And as warm-up flashcards: 1. Ribbons , 2. Extrusion , 3. Flattening Planes , 4. Organic Blobs .

And

5 Drawing Warm-Up Exercises That Will Improve Your Ability To Rotate Primitive Forms

And as warm-up flashcards: 1: Rotating Boxes , 2: Irregularly Stacked Boxes , 3: Boxes Moving Along A Line , 4: Cylinders (Moving Along A Line , 5: Primitive Forms, Rotated .

I also had to develop two new 3D models for this purpose.

Boxes Moving Along A Line

Cylinders Moving Along A Line

I improved the interlocking forms models to prepare for more warm-ups for the flashcards.

Interlocking Forms

I use a new constructive solid geometry engine that makes the way they interlock much clearer.

It will also allow me to add more sophisticated examples of primitives subtracted from other primitives.

This Week

I have bad news. I had to pull the downloads. I was moving the 3D modeling engine to the latest 3D engine I am using, and I will spare you the technical details, but it will not allow you to run the code from a local computer. But you can still access all of it online through your browser!

And in one of life’s sweet ironies my server went down for two days, just a day after my previous newsletter went out, the one where I lamented the stability of the Artwod server. But there you go. It’s back online, and I made the code more robust against the problem.

Which brings me to the topic of backups. All your flashcard progress on Practice Drawing This is stored in your browser. If your browser resets its data or you switch phones, that data is gone. So make sure you make a backup! You can use the backup pane under the statistics pane in the Flashcards or Timed Drawing views.

On a positive note, you can now check a checkbox in the help page of the 3D model viewer to specify that you want to only rotate the model when you click on the dice icon. By default, clicking on it also changes the proportions of the model.

I also changed the index of 3D models . There are now six sections: Primitives, Props, Organic Forms, Combined Forms, Multiple Forms, and Anatomy. Hopefully that makes models easier to find. I have lots of ideas for models to add!

Yours sincerely,