for teachers · art rooms · no prep
warm-ups for the art room
Bell ringers, early finishers, warm-ups and sub plans: 43 short drawing drills that mark themselves in a browser tab. Free, no account needed, runs on a school Chromebook, and one drill takes two to four minutes.
what it actually is
A student opens a page and draws — a straight line between two dots, an ellipse inside a plane, a colour mixed to match a target. The site draws the correct answer over the attempt, gives a mark out of 100 and gets out of the way. That is the whole loop, and it is over in two to four minutes.
Nothing is scored by a model. Every drill grades the marks with plain geometry or a fixed answer key, which is exactly why it can show a student the right line on top of their wrong one.
Nothing is asked of you or of them on the way in: no sign-in, no email, no code to type, no class to create. Type the address, draw, close the tab.
today's warm-up, on the board
Put artdaily.sadeali.com on the projector. The first thing on the page is a list of three drills for the day, and it is the whole lesson plan.
On a browser with nothing on record — a freshly wiped Chromebook, a guest window, a lab machine that resets itself — those three are always the same curated set: Value Trap (2 min), Color Mixer (4 min) and Steady Lines (3 min). Nine minutes for all three, and none of them needs anything better than a trackpad. That is the safest thing to hand a class you have never sat with before.
Once a day has been logged in that browser, the list rotates instead. The three are picked from the date and spread across different chapters, so it is a different corner of the subject each morning, it leans away from whatever that browser did in the last six days, and the three are listed easiest first.
Two projector notes. Whoever used the machine last may have left it in dark mode — every drill page accepts ?theme=light on the end of the URL to force the paper theme for one load, as in artdaily.sadeali.com/lines/?theme=light. And every drill also has its own address, so you can skip the front page entirely and put one straight on the board.
match a drill to this week's lesson
6 chapters · 43 drillsChapter names link to a written guide; drill names link straight to the drill. Minutes are the estimate the drill itself prints on its card.
| Chapter | What it teaches | Drills |
|---|---|---|
| colour8 drills · 2–4 min each | Mixing a colour by eye, hue error against chroma error, warm versus cool as a relationship, and why a shadow is not just the local colour turned down. | Color Mixer 4m · Palette Pick 3m · Mix to Target 3m · Value Trap 2m · Neutral Hunt 2m · Temperature Sort 3m · Colour Constancy 3m · Sun & Sky 3m |
| value & light5 drills · 2–4 min each | How light or dark a thing is once the colour is argued away: value scales, the shaded sphere, three-value thumbnails, hatching a gradient by hand. | Value Squint 3m · Shade a Sphere 4m · Value Thumbnail 4m · Hatch a Ramp 3m · Light Direction 2m |
| line & hand10 drills · 2–4 min each | Confident strokes pulled from the shoulder, ellipses, steady spacing and deliberate line weight. The closest thing here to a newsprint warm-up. | Warm Up 2m · Superimposed Lines 3m · Steady Lines 3m · Ellipse Orbit 3m · Draw Through 3m · Mirror Mirror 4m · Angle Snap 3m · Steady Tunnel 3m · Even Spacing 3m · Line Weight 3m |
| form & perspective11 drills · 2–4 min each | Perspective the practical way: boxes and planes, finding the vanishing points and the horizon, cylinders in space, constructing a cast shadow. | Vanishing Act 4m · Cube From Plane 4m · Box Check 4m · Vanishing Point Hunt 3m · Rotate & Place 3m · Ellipse in Plane 3m · Cylinder Ends 2m · Cast Shadow 4m · Horizon Read 2m · Wrap the Form 3m · Down the Row 3m |
| composition3 drills · 2–3 min each | Where the subject sits inside the frame — cropping, focal placement, and balance as leverage rather than symmetry. | Crop It 3m · Focal Placement 2m · Counterweight 2m |
| observation5 drills · 2–4 min each | Proportion judged by eye, drawing the negative shape instead of the object, holding a form in memory, and catching a gesture fast. | Contour Memory 3m · Proportion Eye 2m · Negative Space 3m · Anatomy Spot 2m · Gesture Capture 4m |
The guides are the half that explains why. Each one quotes the actual tolerance the drill scores against, so when a student asks why a line that looked fine came back at 61, there is an answer with a number in it. Start at how to practice drawing.
four ways to run it
Timings below are the registry's own estimates, added up.
As a bell ringer
Have the front page on the board before the bell. Students open the same address on their own machine and do the first drill in the list, once. It takes two to four minutes, which is roughly how long a class takes to settle anyway, and it ends by itself — the score appears and there is nothing more to do.
what to sayOne round. When your number comes up, write it in the corner of your page and turn it over. We start when the last one is down.
The written-down number is doing real work here, because the site cannot report anything to you (see the last section). A number in the corner of a page is a record you own, on paper, with nothing to sign into.
As an early-finisher station
One bookmark on the classroom machine, or one address on a card taped to it. A student who is done has somewhere to go that is one drill long rather than open-ended.
what to sayObservation chapter. Any two. Then come back.
Naming a chapter rather than the whole catalogue matters — 43 cards is a browsing decision and a student will spend the spare four minutes making it. A chapter is three to eleven drills and the choice takes seconds.
As a five-minute warm-up before life drawing
Three drills line up almost exactly with what a warm-up on newsprint is for: Warm Up (2 min, loosen the arm, speed over accuracy), Superimposed Lines (3 min, the same line four times) and Gesture Capture (4 min, the line of action in seconds). Run one or two of them, then close the laptops and pick up charcoal. Nine minutes for all three if you want the full set.
what to sayScreens for four minutes, from the shoulder, not the wrist. Then they shut and we do the same thing on paper.
As a sub plan
Write one line on the board and nothing else is needed. There is no login for the substitute to explain, nothing to hand out, no code to distribute and nothing to collect at the end.
on the boardartdaily.sadeali.com
Do the three warm-ups at the top of the page.
Then pick a chapter and do two more drills from it.
Write your best score for each one on your sheet.
Be honest with yourself about the arithmetic: the three at the top are about nine minutes and two more are four to eight, so that is a quarter of a period, not a period. It is the front half of a cover lesson. Pair it with something on paper — the still life on your desk, a page of thumbnails — and the screen part is the bit that needs no supervision.
put a drill inside your own page
Any drill embeds in an LMS page, a class blog or a school portal with one line — Canvas, Schoology and Google Sites all take a plain iframe. Tap the line once to select all of it:
<iframe src="https://artdaily.sadeali.com/lines/" title="Steady Lines — a free drawing drill" width="100%" height="760" style="border:0" loading="lazy"></iframe>
Swap /lines/ for any drill's address and put its name in the title. Students draw and get scored exactly as on the drill's own page, the drill keeps its own header and footer inside the frame so the site stays credited, and the data facts below hold unchanged — nothing a student draws leaves the browser, embedded or not. A height around 760 fits the sheet and the controls; there is no embed code to request and no key to issue, because the pages simply allow being framed.
for school IT
Written to be selected and pasted into a ticket as it stands.
Art Daily is a static website of short drawing exercises. To allow it: one domain, artdaily.sadeali.com, HTTPS only. There is no second domain, no media host and no sign-in provider to allow alongside it.
There is nothing to install — no app, no extension, no plugin and no download. It asks for no camera, microphone or location permission. JavaScript needs to be enabled, because the drawing and the scoring both happen in the browser; with JavaScript off the pages still load and still link to each other, but the drills will not run.
It runs in current Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox, on a Chromebook, iPad, Windows or Mac, and takes input from a mouse, a trackpad, a finger or a stylus. No account is needed and there is no sign-in, so there is nothing to provision, no roster to upload and no licence to buy.
On the data question: nothing is collected from a student using the drills, so there is nothing for a student to consent to. The one field on the site that takes an email address is an optional newsletter sign-up in the front page footer, for adults who want to hear when new drills ship; if you would rather a class never saw it, send them straight to a drill URL such as artdaily.sadeali.com/lines/, which has none. Nothing a student draws leaves the browser, and no score is transmitted anywhere. The full detail — every key written to the device, what the page-view counter records, and what is never collected — is at artdaily.sadeali.com/privacy/, which is written for exactly this review.
This page claims no compliance certifications, because a website cannot hold one — those acronyms name laws that bind schools and vendors, not badges a site earns. A tool that advertises them is telling you something about itself. The fact underneath them is the one worth having, and it is in the paragraph above.
One practical note for shared machines: a student's practice record lives in that browser's own storage, so on a shared Chromebook the next student inherits it. Clearing site data removes all of it. The reset it button on the front page does less — it asks for confirmation, then clears the practice record, streak and skill totals, and leaves each drill's personal best behind. For a shared machine, clear site data.
what it does not do
Worth knowing before you show it to anyone else, because none of this is coming next week.
- No class management. No rosters, no groups, no assignments, no due dates.
- No teacher view. You cannot see a student's score from your own machine. The site cannot see it either — it never leaves their browser. If you want a record, they write the number down.
- Nothing to hand out. No account is needed, which is the point on a shared Chromebook — and it is also the reason there is no way to attach a score to a name.
- No printable worksheets. Every drill is drawn on screen. There is nothing to photocopy.
- No curriculum sequencing. The six chapters are a subject order, not a scope and sequence. Nothing unlocks, nothing is gated behind a prerequisite, and no drill assumes you did another one first.
- No standards codes. This page prints no National Core Arts Standards codes, because they have not been checked against the published standards. A decorative code in front of a head of department is worse than an honest gap.
What it is instead: a warm-up instrument. It does one thing, which is to put a short scored drawing exercise in front of a student about ten seconds after they decide to do one, with nothing between them and the drawing. The sequencing, the feedback, the assessment and the record are yours — this is the two minutes at the start.
If it turns out to be useful in your room, the most helpful thing you can do is say which drill and which lesson it landed in. That is on GitHub, and it is the only thing this page asks for.