Paint cutting drill
This is a simple skill-building drill I just made up. It involves using the exact same brush, and only freehand drawing (no other tools), to carve out recognizable versions of predefined shapes.
Goals of the exercise:
Paint complex shapes faster
Add to muscle memory of painting patterns
Deconstruct patterns within shapes better and faster.
Increase stroke economy (reduce the number of strokes needed to define a given shape)
You can observe several of the key factors in this 'paint-cutting' process just by watching the animation -- for example, the need to avoid damaging surrounding pixels. This is like a somewhat hard-mode version of the problem of painting a floor without getting stuck in a corner.
Notes:
Painted using GrafX2, for the clarity of hard-edged pixels.
The second version is just a faster version, because it looks good :)
There is a variation of the exercise that you can do if your paint program has a specific 'eraser' toggle, like MyPaint (which temporarily alters the current brush to paint in Erase mode rather than Normal mode). It's especially useful for working with layers.