Tuesday, November 13, 2007

More Contour Drawings

Here are more of my November daily contour drawings. I have tried a variety of techniques, including blind contour (don't look at the paper at all) and partial blind contour (peek now and then). The technique that I am enjoying most is from the book Charles Reid Master Class Painting by Design by Charles Reid (1991). Reid gives these contour drawing guidelines:
  • Concentrate.
  • Use angles and curves.
  • Keep your pen on the paper at all times.
  • Go slowly at angles; speed up at curves and straight lines.
  • Describe shadows within definite, contained shapes.
  • Stop often, keeping your pen anchored, to compare and relate a new form to one you've already drawn.
  • Leave your boundaries incomplete. Your pen should weave adjacent forms so separations can't always be found.
For some reason, I find that keeping my pen on the paper at all times relaxes me and makes it easier to draw freely. Reid points out that it is more important to make an interesting picture than to copy exactly what you see. For example, one can add interest by using a variety of angles and curves and leaving some parts of the drawing incomplete. I am using two new Micron pens in these drawings: brown .01 and sepia .05.







3 comments:

Brine Blank said...

I really enjoy seeing people's blind contours...one of the hardest things in college was to get over the fact that in the beginning things were't going to look right...it seemed everyone cheated until they/we saw their/our grades (the teachers knew that we had had no practice in this and it was obvious when we did it)...once we got over our 'artistic fear' and actually practiced it was amazing how accurate to scale and angles our hand/eye coordination became without cheating...we always had the same problems with abstraction...but once we broke through the mental barriers our non-abstract work really took off...sorry to be so windy! Great elephant and giraffes, esp. the head areas...

Ester GarcĂ­a said...

Wow, so nice drawings....

:)

Laurel Neustadter said...

Thank you, brine and 3ster. I am really enjoying contour drawing.