USA news on Youtube Sep 26 2018

Now that you've had a chance to play around with your tapered stroke

and practiced with it a little bit I'm going to throw in

one more exercise here that I think will be really useful

and it will tell you whether you have some good stability to your

positioning of your hand.

If I don't have the heel of my hand on here

in a stationary position, and it ends up by pivoting there instead

of the place I talked about about

we're going to just pivot our fingers on that imaginary pin

we will have some play in our stroke and we won't be able to do

what I call tracking.

We're going to go ahead and call this exercise the tracking exercise,

because I want to be able to put another stroke on top of another

stroke, and for the most part have it look like its the same stroke

but only getting a just a little bit darker. I want you to watch for that too.

It should be increasing in value ever so slightly as I repetitively

put another stroke on top of the last one. I'm going to shorten this stroke up

a little bit too.

The last one was good to be a little bit longer

it gave us the feel for sweeping on and off the paper

and kind of get that follow-through feel but I'm going to shorten

this up about 2 inches on this one. And we'll even be able to get it

down to a quarter of an inch and still have tapers on it

if we go through this whole series of exercises.

So let's go ahead and do this initial taper.

See it increasing in value? You can get a little thicker,

but for the most part it's maintaining a good tracking.

Now, what will happen if I have my hand pivoting

it would be like this. I won't be able to really count

on the direction there will be some play,

if I'm not gripping my pencil tight enough that could also

be a problem.

And I want to be able to have something

that I have a lot better control over

and these are some of the things to watch for.

Go ahead and practice this I think it would be a real good exercise

It's short, and you can do this as often as you want

to fine tune your ability to control your flow-and-grace stroke.