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Question about warm-ups

2:34 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020

I was wondering if there's a particular way we should pick the warm-ups exercises from lessons 1 and 2. In the FAQ, Uncomfortable says to do them for about 15 minutes each time we draw. However, some of those exercises, such as the rotated boxes and the texture ones take way more than 15 minutes to finish. Should I still include it in the pool and do it less frequently than the others?

Right now my warm-up includes doing the superimposed lines, ghosted lines, table of ellipses, funnels and ellipses in planes- about two pages of each one of those per week - as well as drawing some boxes following the process of the 250 box challenge. It already takes me more than 15 minutes per day, haha. But I have no idea if the way I'm picking these exercises makes sense.

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5 users agree
2:45 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020
edited at 2:47 PM, Feb 5th 2020

Personally, I let a random number generator dictate my 3 exercises. I do this because I feel that it's important to do them all, rather than stick to the 3 usual suspects (superimposed lines, ellipses in planes, organic perspective.) If you decide to do this, and notice that the rng gods like certain numbers more than others, feel free to have a system where if you roll the same thing 2 days in a row, you get to skip it, and roll again. As for the rotated boxes exercise and the texture exercises, feel free to do 1 quadrant of the former, and skip the latter. I don't do this myself, but it might be a good idea to have a page for each exercise, and work on it for 5 minutes every time you roll it, and then leave it at that (incomplete as it is), to come back to it next time. Anyway, regardless of how you decide to go about it, make sure it doesn't exceed the 15 minute mark, lest it defeat the purpose.

edited at 2:47 PM, Feb 5th 2020
9:13 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020

Well, I must definitivly be defeating the purpose of the warm-ups, then. Sometimes, mine take almost one hour. It seems nice to measure the warm-ups in minutes rather than in pages, I'll give it a try.

5 users agree
9:02 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020

What I did for my latest warmup was a frame of rough perspective, with some ghosted planes off to the side-to prepare me for the rotated boxes I was working on for that exercise. I was only able to complete one frame in the 15 minutes with a few of the context-less ghosted planes on the side, so I'll be able to go back to that warmup sheet later and do it some more!

That said, my issue is that I know I will start forgetting certain exercises that are available for warmups so I actually went and made this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4msWQRk4g-fSlJ8Kn6N9QSarws7DAMm3ZKqTgkgTmA/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to make your own copy if you want to customize it! And definitely don't work past the 15 minute mark, you're supposed to do a maximum of 3 different warmup exercises, to get you in the headspace for the actual lesson you're wanting to learn (and not lose your skill in certain things)

9:18 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020

The spreadsheet looks great, I copied it :)

I don't do more than 3 exercises per day, but I do a full page of each one, so it takes a while. Or maybe I'm just slow, which is probably something I should work on, haha

9:41 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020

Good on doing less than 3, but if you spend more than 15 minutes on your warmups then they kinda stop being warmups. From the Lesson 0 section on grinding and warmups

we take all of the exercises we've learned thus far and incorporate them into a pool, from which we draw two or three exercises at the beginning of each session to do for 10-15 minutes. This does not mean doing them to completion, or to any particular page count - just to work on them for a set period of time before moving onto the main focus of that session.

Doing them to completion turns them from a helpful exercise to get your head in the game and give you a sort of review before working on new stuff, into something that becomes another task in and of itself-a grind. There's no shame in being slow, I thought I could do multiple frames of rough perspective the other day as a warmup and barely finished one.

I do encourage you to watch the new video on grinding and read the updated section on it since grinding and warmups are bundled together https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/4/grinding

4 users agree
2:36 AM, Thursday February 6th 2020

In order to get everything to fit within the 15 minutes do a chunk, like one section of the rotated boxes for example. The way imo you should pick exercises should be based on what you are struggling with. For example if boxes are your weak point aim to have box related stuff as your warmups more often. ^_^

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