Warm-Up Exercises: End ‘Sacrificial Pancakes’
Warm-up exercises are one of those things that most of us avoid, right? Most of us like to dive right into the ‘fun’; whether it’s exercise or sketching.
How many times have you gone out to sketch in your Nature Journal, only to be disappointed in those first sketches you attempt? If you follow Jack Laws, or Marley Piefer, they call these initial sketches ‘sacrificial pancakes’. It’s just like making pancakes for breakfast. The first one is almost always a flop.
Good news! There is a way to put an end to most of those initial awkward sketches.
Why We Need to Warm-Up
Anything we do that has more than one step involved, over time, creates a connection between the muscles used to accomplish the task and our brains. It’s a bit like a short-cut key on your computer. Think about something like driving a stick-shift. When you first start to learn, you have to very consciously think about each and every step. It’s difficult to coordinate the movements. Once you’ve driven that car for a while, you no longer need to think it through. It becomes subconscious — you can think of other things as you drive. You have created a muscle memory.
Creating muscle memory for sketching and drawing is similar. Your brain makes the connection between certain shapes and your brain. You know what those common shapes look like and how to create them.
There is another element involved, however, and this is where the warm-up comes into play.
Warm-up exercises for sketching help us to switch gears. It signals our brain that we’re going to draw now, so that your muscle memory kicks in. It’s much like winding down after your work day. During our commute home, most of us listen to music or maybe our favorite podcast. That activity tells our brain that work is over, we’re switching to personal time now.
Simple Warm-Up Exercises
I’m not gonna lie. I don’t always remember to warm-up before I begin a drawing session. But when I do, I’m happier with my first results and the session as a whole is much more enjoyable.
Start off with some simple lines; vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. Switch-up the pressure. Go from light to dark, dark to light; play with the line weight.
Begin with lines – vary the direction and weight 
Move on to s-curves. Again vary the direction and weight
In case you were curious — my favorite graphite drawing pencils — Derwent Graphic Pencils. These have been my go-to pencils for years. For me, the graphite is smoother and creamier.
Now try more organic-shaped lines, s-curves and such. Again, vary the direction and the line weights.
Next move on to basic shapes: circles, ellipses, cones, and rectangles. Make sure to vary the sizes and angles.
The last exercise I do is putting some of the shapes together. A triangle + an ellipse = a cone, which can become a bird’s beak later when you’re sketching.
Turn the 2-D shapes into 3-D forms. A triangle becomes a cone — which becomes maybe a bird’s beak.
A rectangle becomes a cylinder, which in turn becomes a tree branch or the body of a mammal.
A rectangle plus a couple of ellipses = a cylinder, which later becomes a tree branch, or perhaps the body of a deer. You get the idea.
So there you have it. Written out, it looks a bit intimidating but in reality we’re only talking about a few minutes to do all of these exercises. I promise that taking those couple of minutes will reward you with much better sketches from the beginning. Remember, this is not about perfecting anything. It’s about switching gears and letting your brain know that you are getting ready to draw.
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Hone Your Drawing Skills with Coloring Pages
How can you hone drawing skills with a coloring book?!
Bear with me, I promise you won’t be disappointed! I have had a life-long love affair with crayons. It’s true! I remember as a child, the best part of ‘back to school’ was getting that brand new box of 64 Crayolas to start the year. Close your eyes — can you smell them?
When the new crayons for school arrived, last year’s box became my play at home box. And boy did they get some use!
So, what’s the point of that little story? Actually, not the crayons, but the coloring books!
Coloring books have the power to help you get better at sketching and drawing. What? But the drawing is already completed, right? We just color in the image.
And that is where the power lies. How will you color in the image? Will you use color at all?
Grab a coloring page and a few tools and let’s get started. You’ll need:
- A pen, pencil, or fine-line marker
- Coloring media of your choice
- Colored pencils — I use Prismacolor Premiere
- Markers
- Watercolor
- Or yes, even crayons!
- A coloring book page (you can download free ones from many sites, I’ve gotten these pages from Crayola’s website.)
For these exercises, I prefer children’s coloring pages because they are usually just outlines without the added shading that many adult pages have. We’re going to be adding the shading ourselves!
Use Color Variation For Shading
The first technique we’re going to play with is creating shadows and shading with color. Let’s begin by choosing 3 shades of a color; a light, a medium, and a dark. I generally begin with coloring the entire area with the lightest shade. Make sure to leave the highlight white or very light. Putting the light color over the whole area kind of helps to tie and blend all the colors together a bit more seamlessly.
3 shades of blue + dark purple for deep shadows 
Color whole area with lightest color
Next, take the medium color and lay it down in the darkest and medium toned areas. Again layering the colors this way helps to tie all of the colors together.
Now for the darkest areas. When using colored pencil, I put down a bit of really dark purple — in Prismacolor pencils, it’s the Black Grape pencil. This helps to give the darkest areas a bit more depth. Use this one lightly, sparingly. Over the Black Grape goes your darkest shade.
Medium blue in the dark & mid-tone areas 
Dark purple in the deepest shadows 
Darkest blue in the shadows to blend out the purple
Make sure as you go that you are lightly blending all the colors together — in general, you don’t want harsh lines and transitions. Hard lines do happen in nature when the lighting is particularly bright, so this isn’t a hard and fast rule.
Last step: Go over the whole image one last time with the lightest blue to blend everything together Now, step back a bit from your page. Doesn’t it look more life-like, 3 – dimensional?
Keep practicing! Try imagining the light coming from different angles and see how that changes the drawing.
Hone Those Drawing Skills Using Mark-Making
Next up — let’s look at adding another dimension to the shadowed areas with a fine-line marker or pen. To play around with this process, you need to find a really simply done coloring page — one that doesn’t already have a lot of lines and shading. That’s what you’re here to do!
For this technique you’ll need a waterproof (or at least a smear-proof) pen or marker, 3 shades of pink (or your own color choice), plus a dark purple.
My favorite waterproof marker is the Faber Castel Pitt Artist Pen
Any place where your chosen subject is round or goes around a corner, you’ll add some marks:
- Hatching
- Cross-hatching
- Scribbles
- Or a combination
Make your marks darker and closer together in the deeper shadowed areas, lighter and farther apart in the mid-toned areas. Also think about following the contours of your subject — that alone will add an element of realism to your work.
Using your pen, make hatches in the shadowed areas. Make the marks more solid and closer together in the deepest shadow areas; lighter and more spread apart in the mid-tone areas.
If you choose, you can also add in color over the ink after you’ve given it sufficient time to dry. When adding color, follow the same procedure that we used in our first example.
Color entire image with lightest shade 
Fill in dark and mid-tone areas with medium 
Hit the darkest shadows with dark purple 
Go over the darkest areas with darkest shade to blend out the purple 
Go over the whole piece again with the light shade to blend everything together
These are just 2 quick ways to practice realism and hone your drawing skills using a coloring book! Play! Have fun! Challenge yourself! Once you feel you’ve gotten the idea with the coloring pages, move on to use these shading techniques in your Nature Journal — you’ll be so happy you allowed yourself to play like when you were a child.
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