The Value Of Warming Up As A Sketcher

I’ve heard many times that sketchers should warm up.  I suppose there’s a number of ways to do it.  You could draw circles, do a bunch of hatching, maybe draw some thumbnails, or do a few quicksketches.  I’ll be honest, I don’t do it.  Too lazy I guess.

As part of my March “biding my time til spring” regime, I went to one of the malls with the idea of drawing people.  These were quick sketches, of course, as people in malls are on the move.  They might stop for a minute but that’s a “long pose” in mall time.  What I noticed was that as I quick sketched people, my sketches got better (subjective assessment).  Maybe it was the McDonalds coffee but I have to think that it may have been due to becoming warmed up.  I’ll let you decide:

Page one:

This page definitely suffers from proportion problems, lots of errant lines, etc.  I don’t judge them too harshly as each figure took no more than 20-30 seconds, but…

Page 2:

These seem a bit better but that guy in the middle really looks weird.  He was very tall so maybe I just got carried away.

Page 3:

This is the third page I did and, in my opinion, they’re not bad at all.  Maybe I was warmed up.  Maybe I was just lucky.  I still find that drawing people so quickly is really tough.  There’s no time for assessing much of anything.  I just keep the pen moving.  What do you think?  Do you warm up?