good exercises to get nice loose lines?

[Anurizm]

I am trying to get make my sketches with good loose lines. anyone have any good exercises for getting me to loosen up a bit and some things to keep in mind?

[lordofthebling]

1) Draw lots of circles, loops, ovals, etc. Or anything that involves repeated, loose but controlled lines. Experiment with different types of line quality.

2) Draw hair. Also, any organic textures are a good opportunity.

3) I've checked out your sketchbook thread, and while you're a very good draftsman, some of your figure studies are stiff and wonky. Rather than trying to draw the figure exactly as how it should look, do more gestures. Go to open life drawing sessions, or draw people on the street in this way. This is a necessary skill in order to construct a convincing figure. Without it, all the anatomy studies in the world won't help you. And after you've built a core foundation for the figure (think of it as a wire armature before sculpting a figure out of clay), your linework will follow.

4) Stop drawing from photos.

[drummingpariah]

5) do some gesture drawing. basically, pick an object. try to sketch the outline using only one line, without ever looking down at the paper. it's almost like doing an etch-e-sketch, now that i think about it, but you can't look down. that's so important. this will strengthen your lines while giving you freedom to have them imperfect and still keep your forms recognizable.

(i realize you mentioned gestures, but didn't explain how to do them or what the purpose really is)

[tensai]

A few more suggestions:

-Adding to the elips excersise: Take some big paper (A3) and draw straight parallel lines (do horizontals as well as verticals). Draw them with your whole arm/lock your wrist. Doing this big really helps you going that distance. We had to do this a lot when I was in architecture school and it definitely helped a lot with drawing large perspectives and facade studies from life.

-Ghosting: When you draw technical things it often helps to put two dots (mental or physical) and ghost over the paper a couple of times - like pratice runs. Then while you're ghosting you just put the pen down on the paper and you have your line.

-Draw with pen for a while and lock your wrist/draw from your elbow/shoulder.

-If you work from life or ref: Look longer at your subject than on your paper. look first, hold it in your mind, and put it down deliberately. This way you don't figure out how a certain curve goes each and every millimeter but just throw it down after looking intently. Squinting helps a lot for this too.

If I think of some more I'll add to this. Hope that helps, have fun man.