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11:06 PM, Sunday February 2nd 2020

Think of it this way. You're drawing from your elbow, and you realize halfway through your stroke that you can't actually physically bend your elbow any more, but your stroke needs to keep going. So you end up engaging your shoulder to make it the rest of the way.

This is a problem because this kind of "change to the recipe" (the recipe being the ratio of how much you're moving from each pivot) results in a sudden change to the trajectory of your stroke, which messes with their fluidity and flow. This is why we focus so heavily on having students draw any smoothly flowing lines from their shoulder the whole way through. Students also have the hardest time getting comfortable with that pivot, so using it even where the elbow may suffice helps make it easier in the long run.

12:08 AM, Monday February 3rd 2020

Aren't there situations where you naturally mix pivots at the start of the motion? Like what if you're right-handed and you draw a long horizontal line that starts near the left side of your body and moves right. Can't that motion start with a little bit of elbow movement to get your arm into a better position to sort of "push" the pen with your shoulder for the rest of the movement? And if you're drawing a long line from right to left with your shoulder, won't you're elbow eventually get to a point to where it'll hit the side of your body, forcing you to pivot from it? And the same thing can happen with lines that move from top to bottom.

This feels like something that's difficult to communicate with only words. Is there any chance you could post a video explaining this in more depth?

2:21 AM, Monday February 3rd 2020

I do have a video in lesson 1's page on this topic, and it is on my list of videos to redo so I'll try and address it more at that time. It's not going to be coming up in the next few weeks though as I'll need time to recover from all the work that has gone into the community platform.

That said, there is one important thing your question overlooks, though that may be understandable if you haven't gotten too far into lesson 1's exercises just yet: we always rotate the page in order to give ourselves as comfortable an angle of approach as we can. That is, that's what we do in the context of these lessons, in order to build up the general understanding of how the arm works, and how best to use it. Outside of Drawabox, you apply that understanding, but you aren't bound to any such rules.

3:17 AM, Monday February 3rd 2020
edited at 4:11 PM, Feb 3rd 2020

So then in general is it possible to make a stroke that starts with the elbow and then switches to the shoulder in a fluid, flowing motion, or is it universally always better to try and use only the shoulder? It feels like it'd be a useful skill to have, especially if you want to hit lines at weird angles on a surface that you can't rotate. Also, if you want to draw a large cirlce in front of you, it feels like you can either have your arm hanging at your side and make the motion by using both elbow movement and shoulder movement, or else you have to have your arm out in front of you and bend your elbow at a 90 degree angle, which lets you draw the circle without moving your elbow too much but it feels really exaggerated.

I think I just want to be able to draw without worrying about whether I'm using too much elbow movement or whatever. It seems like it'd be stressful to have to keep track of something like that constantly.

edited at 4:11 PM, Feb 3rd 2020
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