[Music] There are two major types of skills that are involved in drawing. Mechanical skills, the things you physically do with your body, and analytical skills, the concepts you understand in your head. Both are addressed throughout this course, but we're going to get started by looking at the most important mechanical skill of all, how we use our arms to make marks. It sounds simple. After all, you've been using your arms to do all kinds of things throughout your whole lives. But while you're probably very familiar with the mechanics of writing, you are probably equally unaware of the other ways in which your arm can be moved and how this can impact the marks that you produce. Movement occurs from joints like the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder. And often different parts will move in concert, pivoting on multiple joints at once without you having to think about it. If you reach out to grab a glass of water, for example, you're not thinking about every part that needs to move in order to reach your goal. You just do it. It's an instinct and it's in your muscle memory. Just like walking and breathing. And while breathing is something you were more or less born to do, walking wasn't so. When you were young, you had to learn all of these skills that you now take for granted. And you did it by concentrating, by being very conscious about every little action you performed and every little step you took and how you managed your balance. This is how instinctual behavior and muscle memory is developed. First, we do things consciously and over time, it becomes second nature. Today, you're a baby once again. This course will develop your instincts and your muscle memory, but it will do so through a lot of very direct conscious action. Everything you do here will be the result of intent, of planning, and of forethought. It will be frustrating, and you're going to slip up often. You'll find yourself drifting off in thought, and you will have to reassert that control over every action you perform. These things will happen, so don't worry about when they do. And ultimately, when you're done, you will have a much more instinctual control over how you handle your mark making. And you'll no longer have to think about how every single mark needs to go down and more about which marks you want to make. Your body will handle the rest. Depending on which pivot your arm is moving from, you can make marks that are tight and precise, like these lines from the wrist, but quite limited in terms of how far they can really go before you go start wobbling too much. and marks that flow smoothly and fluidly and maintain a consistent trajectory like these lines from the shoulder. They aren't entirely precise and they don't make, you know, super tight turns like these with like on the dime precision. But their ability to maintain a smooth consistent trajectory over a long distance and even shorter distances is extremely valuable. Both ultimately have their purposes, but because you're used to writing and are likely already familiar with drawing from your wrist, and that's probably what you use for most of your marks, this course puts a lot of focus on drawing from your shoulder. So that by the time you're through, you'll be able to do so with the same level of comfort and familiarity with which you draw from your wrist already. So what does it mean to draw from your shoulder? The easiest way to demonstrate this is to step through each different joint, pinning it down in space and trying to draw. First, the wrist. This is what we're used to doing. And we'll generally anchor our wrist in the same location as we write a particular letter. It's great for the kind of precision that writing demands. And as you can see, you're able to make really fine, specific bends and twists, you know, like writing your letters. It's all very precise. Then you've got the elbow. In your own drawings, that is outside of Draw a Box. You're going to be using this one a lot. It'll be a little unfamiliar at first, but it's definitely easier to use than your shoulder. So people tend to gravitate towards it. So here, if I'm just holding my elbow in in place, you can see that I can make longer strokes and they're still remaining quite smooth and I can execute them without too much wobbling or or winess. Finally, you've got the shoulder and that's what we're going to be using for most of our marks in this course. and definitely all of those throughout this entire lesson in particular. It provides a broad sweep covering a large distance. I don't even need to hold it because that's pretty much the only pivot I've got left. And it will actually work for smaller strokes, too. So, let's let's start out with looking at just the kind of marks that you can make from your shoulder, keeping them fairly straight and smooth. And you can also maintain really nice flow for even those shorter marks. Although this is something students often struggle with. When you get caught up working in a small scale, you'll end up feeling more restricted and more limited because it will feel a little bit awkward to use your shoulder in that situation. But still push yourself to use that shoulder even when the marks are tiny. And you'll find that your ability to make smooth flowing marks that are even that short will improve over time and that will be a very useful tool. Now, of course, moving forward, you won't need well, moving forward in your own drawings, that is you won't necessarily need to use the shoulder every time, but it's important in this course, and it you're never going to be using your elbow here because the elbow is just a fairly easy alternative, and we want to make sure that you are well equipped with all your tools. So drawing from your shoulder means primarily driving that motion from your shoulder joint. Your upper arm here will move noticeably. Whereas when you draw from your elbow, the upper arm would remain static. Like if I'm holding this down and trying to pivot from it, this upper arm remains still. In the past, I've talked about locking your other joints and keeping them from moving. But I think that this phrasing tends to stress people out. And some people just get so obsessed with the idea of, "Oh, how do I know if I'm drawing from my my shoulder or not my elbow?" And it's not worth the trouble. People overthink it so much and it just ends up being a waste of time. So instead, let's talk about just how we're driving that motion. So driving it from the shoulder, meaning that the whole arm is moving, and whether or not part of the arm is remaining frozen when it shouldn't. A common source of trouble for students is when they anchor their elbows quite heavily onto the tabletop. And this limits us from pivoting from anything but our elbow or our wrist. The upper arm simply can't move because it's just pinned down. Don't worry, though. For those of you who rest your hand gently on the page for added stability, it's still quite a light contact and isn't quite the kind of heavy anchor that your elbow gets. And so you can still do this as long as you're aware and keeping track of where you're drawing from. You may catch yourself slipping back to drawing from the wrist, but just correct yourself as you do that. And always be, you know, attentive to this sort of thing. All I want you to do whenever you make a mark is to think about how your arm is moving, try to engage that whole arm from the shoulder. Focus on flow and fluidity over accuracy. You know, students tend to be focus too much on being very slow and steady to be, you know, hyper accurate when in doing so they they lose all this fluidity and flow to their strokes. And that's something we're going to talk about in a later video. Just remember, we're focusing on the shoulder here because that is the part that people struggle with. Because it's difficult, because it's uncomfortable, we naturally gravitate away from using it even when it's the best tool for the job. We have a natural tendency to go down the path of least resistance. And by focusing on the shoulder throughout this course, we can eliminate that resistance so that we can keep our conscious attention on what we're drawing rather than physically how when drawing our own things.