#73 - Practicing Drawing Cylinders Is A Good Way To Warm Up And It Is Surprisingly Useful
I am focusing on drawing in my sketchbook and not showing the results to anyone, but I get a dopamine hit from sharing work, and creating these posts can be fun when there isn’t the pressure to post daily. I felt like sharing a drawing exercise again, so here goes.
Cylinders are surprisingly versatile. You’ll often end up in a situation where it is useful to be able to draw them. For example, it is helpful to approximate arms through cylinders when drawing a manikin of a human form.
(Cylinders can also approximate fingers, but I prefer boxes.)
One good warm-up exercise I got from Watts Atelier is to draw circles and ellipses. This exercise improves your hand dexterity and ability to draw circles and ellipses while also getting you into the mental state of calmness needed to start work on a real drawing. You can find out more about my warm-up drawing exercises here.
You can use my 3D cylinder models for reference while practicing drawing cylinders. The 3D viewer works in most browsers, including the one on your mobile phone.
You can also deform cylinders into organic shapes.
It’s just useful to be able to freehand cylinders! And it is a great drawing exercise when you have no reference to work from or no inspiration. Become better at drawing by doodling cylinders.