RB Warmups

Link to: Category:OSERB

Duration: About 10 minutes

Some drawing warmup exercises are recommended in a Youtube video and are summarized below:

Quick eye-hand warm-up exercises. a. Ten Strokes; b. Cartwheels; c. Atoms; d. Coin Flips; e. Hatching; f. Connect the Dots; g. Half Ellipses; h. Curved Hatching.

To these exercises I have added a few more.

Performing these exercises forces the eye and hand to work together. They are to be done as quickly as possible to force the eye and hand to work with precision at speed in different orientations.

Quick eye-hand warm-up exercises. a. Zaps; b. Suns; c. Arrows; d. Arrow-Sun.

The first set of patterns reminded me of a set of basis functions with a low spectral frequency. The second set was designed to create some other functions with coordinated movements at higher frequencies. The last two figures are quite challenging to draw accurately at speed.

Compare these figures with an illustration (below) from the book "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene (2009). This figure shows a progression from bottom to top of increasing visual complexity as progressive layers of neurons associate primitive shapes into more complicated shapes in order to recognize letters, pairs of letters, and then whole words. In the book he actually maps out the locations in the brain where these processing steps occur in reading.

We make an analogy between eye-hand exercises and shape recognition in reading. Supposing the existence of analogous layers of neurons responsible for coordinating eye-hand movement we start with simple movements and then combine them into more complicated forms. By practicing with shapes with increasing levels of complexity we can develop precision in the intermediate layers in the (hypothetical) eye-hand motion system.

Assembly of simple visual responses into letters and words (from bottom to top) from Dehaene, "Reading in the Brain" pg. 151.