5 minute session Line control

Almost everything that makes a drawing look tentative comes from the same habit: laying a line down in five short careful passes instead of one. The short passes feel safer because each one is easier to correct, and the result reads as uncertain no matter how accurate it ends up being.

The fix is uncomfortable and fast. You draw the line in one motion, from the shoulder rather than the fingers, looking at where the line is going to END rather than at the pen. It will miss. It will miss less every day, and a confident line that misses slightly reads better than a careful one that does not.

These drills are twenty seconds each because that is long enough to draw eight lines and too short to fuss over any of them. Do them before you draw anything else - a minute of this changes how the next twenty minutes look.