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Warm Up

loosen the arm — speed over accuracy

round
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score
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best
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Loosening the arm before the real work

Three sets, 25 seconds each. Fill the box with overlapping loops; then run parallel diagonals corner to corner without slowing down; then draw big lazy figure eights and keep the pen moving. The clock starts on your first mark rather than on a countdown you have to catch, and you can lift whenever you like — every stroke in a set is added to the same total. A trackpad cannot pull a long line in one contact, so strokes made of several segments are the expected input here, not a compromise.

None of this is meant to look like anything. The marks can be ugly, because the sets ask the arm to move from the shoulder rather than asking the hand to be accurate, and that is different equipment from the kind a careful drawing uses. The progress ring reflects it: it fills with the distance your stroke has travelled, never with accuracy, so what is visibly rewarded is motion. There is no red pen anywhere in this drill.

Effort first, shape second

A set is 60 points of distance covered plus 40 of a loose shape check. The target is four box-diagonals of travel, measured on whatever canvas you have, which comes out at roughly 25 seconds of scribbling at an easy pace. The shape half is measured per set — for circles, how many detected loops hold their radius spread inside tolerance; for sweeps, how tightly the directions agree, folded modulo 180° so a sweep and its return count as one axis; for eights, that the ink crossed itself, crossings between separate strokes included. Those tolerances ease for the pointer in your hand, so an honest scribble reads the same from a pen, a mouse or a finger. The round is the mean of three, and each set closes by saying how far your hand travelled, in metres. No AI is involved in any of that — the score is arithmetic on the points your pointer left behind: distance added up, loops and crossings counted.

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