Contour Line Drawings

Contour Line Drawings

Today's topic is contour line drawings. There a couple different ways to do contour line drawings: blind contour drawings, and modified contour drawings. The first one is blind contour drawings. You'll need a sharpie or a marker or pen, not a pencil, because it's too easy to cover up mistakes, and lastly you’ll need paper. First you'll find a hand position and make sure your hand is not visible at the same time your paper is, in other words look away from your paper. Without looking at the paper draw a line on the paper that corresponds to where your eyes look at your hand position. Don't pick up the marker from the paper. Follow the lines on your hands to create the drawing. This may feel difficult because you are not able to look at your paper, it’s okay, but don’t look at the page.

The second type of contour drawing is the modified version. You can now look at the paper! This time really focus on the details and making sure you’re relying on your eyes not an idea of what you should be drawing. Keep your eyes on your hand the majority of the time. You can now not keep your pen to the paper all the time but try not to pick it up too much either.

A lesson plan that you can do with this is having students partner up they must do a blind contour portrait of their partner and a modified one. This is great the first week of classes for students to be silly and get to know someone they might not otherwise have met. The students will do the modified version and their partner can call them out for looking at their paper too much. This way they are aware of the amount of time they spend looking at the paper versus looking at the subject. At the end of the project you will have an interesting piece to keep.