exercises for using less lines?

i'm trying to get better at proportions and gestures but my lines are very scribbly. what can I focus on to get more accurate lines?

What worked for myself was practicing drawing a perfect circle with one line repeatedly, and drawing with *one* continuous line. Doesn't matter if you make a mistake, keep drawing with one line. It helped reduce my chicken scratching a lot!

Scribbling often means insecurity about what form are you trying to tell. So, first, just get used to the fact that not all lines will look "perfect". Make sure that the form or gesture is readable — and this is enough. Think about every line as intentionally chosen. Don't overthink it, though, but, when reassessing your work, prompt yourself why you did this line or this line or did you had to use so many lines for this form, and so on. You might need to slow down in practice to actually see this process of choosing where to put the lines.

Try using liner, if you do traditional, or some same-opacity brush (like for lineart), if digital. You might scribble because you are trying to clarify form, but once it's hard brush, attempts to "scribble out" the form will only makes things worse, so gotta be decisive from the start. And yeah, no eraser, or at least no transformation tools, helps too.

Toniko Pantoja in his videos discusses line confidence, though from animation perspective. Yet it's helpful in illustration and sketching too. We are doing every day now exercises from [url=&t=760s&pp=ygUedG9uaWtvIHBhbnRvamEgbGluZSBjb25maWRlbmNl]this video[/url].

It helps both in study practice and personal work A LOT. Highly recommend!!

You might use some other exercises as well, if long lines are hard in general. Just find on Youtube something like "lineart exercises", and find something that is hardest for you. Straight lines crossing dot, curved lines in parallel, whatever. And do them everyday as warm up.

AND PLEASE, check your hand posture! Don't draw everything from the wrist!!! Use elbow or even whole arm. Wrist is for details, though we avoid using it — hand muscles are weak in comparison with arm, so, ergonomically speaking, drawing everything from elbow-to-arm is best in long-term anyway.

And for the rest — just stay mindful during whatever practice you do. It will be at first annoying to monitor yourself for scribbling, but that's how bad habits removal works, lol.

Good luck!

If you want to try to use less lines in your gesture drawings. I would reccomend sketching with a ball-point pen instead of a pencil when you do your gesture drawings. 

From my experience, using a pen made me consider more my lines and proportions as well. Since with a ball-point pen, you aren't able to erase your mistakes which you can use the information where you notice the mistake in your art to redo the drawing closer to the correct proportions. 

Don't be at all afraid to make mistakes in your sketches. The more comfortable you are with the medium you are working with, the better it is in the long run with improving your linework.

Hope that helps!