Wrist, elbow and shoulder
One of the most important tasks for me is to learn how to draw from my shoulder.
I think most of you have heard from their art teachers to draw from the shoulder, I definitely did, but however, I got never told why. Why should I draw in a way I am not comfortable with when I have a method that works well? A good question with an easy answer.
Back at school I was often frustrated that I couldn’t draw well on big canvases, except I drew small stuff. Small stuff was easy, and practical since I drew in secret during class and stamp size drawings also fit much better into the pages of school books (don’t do that, it’s not okay). Eventually I came to the understanding that I am not able to draw big and found pride in being a stamp size illustrator.
The solution for my problem would have been drawing from my shoulder.
In this graphic you can see the three ways of drawing: wrist, elbow and shoulder
You can see that the wrist has a very small range. Given, you have high control with it, since you’ve trained it for long. When writing, you do this entirely from the wrist. But the range is very small. Another disadvantage is the design of our wrists. The joints let us draw in a radius und prevent us from drawing straight lines (we can learn straight-ish lines, but they are not healthy for our wrists). Still, I love drawing from my wrist. The high control is perfect for details.
The elbow gives us a much higher range, but still there is a curve in our lines, because of the design of the joint. Combined with the wrist, you can overcome this disadvantage and achieve much. But drawing from the elbow mean fixing your elbow (like putting it on a surface to stabilise it). For me it feels like a bad compromise. I still don’t have the full advantage from both and risk overusing my wrist - risking damage.
The shoulder has a very flexible joint, which gives us, if trained, high control. You can draw long lines, but also smaller details. Honestly, it’s one of the best ways to draw from. It isn’t as fine-motor as the wrist, which makes drawing from it tricky, but it lets our lines look way more confident, which instantly makes a drawing more interesting. Aaaand, a big advantage, you have a very high reach. Filling a large canvas is way easier from your shoulder and if the reach isn’t enough, you can use your elbow and wrist additionally: three joints, extremely high reach.
I made a comparison of the reach of each joint. I think you can clearly see the differences. For straight lines, I highly recommend the shoulder.
As I also said, the control is different with each joint. The wrist gives high control on a limited space, while elbow has low control on a big space. And once again the winner is the shoulder. You get a high range and have high control, not exact as high as with the wrist, but definitely higher than I have in this graphic, since my shoulder isn’t trained for drawing yet.
So that’s my babbling about why I want to learn to draw from my shoulder. I guess it’s better understandable now. It only has advantages. But to be honest, my main reasons are to let my lines look more confident and to keep my wrist from damage, it already hurts sometimes.
