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Superimposed Lines

draw the same line four times

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Four copies of the same line

A faint guide line appears with a clear start dot, and you draw that line four times, always from the dot. Each repeat goes down in darker ink, so the fan your own hand makes is there to look at. Four sets, about three minutes, ramping from a short straight to a longer, gently curved line. A repeat can take as many contacts as it needs: press back near where you lifted and the same line carries on, press back on the dot and that repeat starts over. After each set your spread is shaded in around your own mean path, with a verdict in words.

It is the classic Drawabox warm-up, and what it trains is commitment. You are measured against yourself, never against a ruler-straight ideal: four copies that agree beat four careful ones that do not, and that is the whole lesson. The way there is to draw the first one with your eyes on the end point and then repeat without correcting, since mid-stroke corrections are exactly what make a line read as shaky.

The three habits behind the number

Fraying is worth 55: the perpendicular spread of the four repeats around their own mean path, normalised by the guide's length and measured against that path's own tangent, so pulling one repeat faster than another never reads as fraying, and the first half-percent is free. Commitment is worth 30 and reads each stroke's smoothness as turning angle with the mean turn taken out, so an intended curve costs nothing while wobble, corrections and stop-starts show. Start discipline is the last 15, how tightly the four presses cluster on the dot. A round is the mean of its four sets, the zero-points shift with whatever you are drawing on, which the HUD prints, and at the end the weakest of the three is called out. There is no AI in it: each of the three terms is a formula over your own sample points — a spread, a turning angle and a cluster radius.

More line & hand drills: Steady Lines · Ellipse Orbit · Draw Through · the whole catalogue