Blind contour drawing
of three onions
Blind contour drawing is done by drawing the contour outline of the subject without looking at the paper as you work. (See example at right.) Many artists use blind contour drawing as an warm-up exercise before a drawing session. Drawing is a very special skill. It's about coordinating your hand to draw what you are truly seeing.
When you take a pencil in your hand and trace the contour of the subject without looking at the paper, you learn to "feel" the lines of the subject. If your eye sees a line leans to the right, your hand pulls the pencil to the right. This "feel" of a line is very important. It leaps past logical thinking (which would be saying something to you like "get out a ruler and compass and measure that line exactly!") and takes you right into a special "drawing zone" where you draw what you see without thinking about it.
If you think about what you're drawing too much, your logical brain tells you what the subject "should" look like, and that's where a good deal of bad drawing comes from. We all have preconceived notions of how things look. Too see what I mean, make a very quick sketch of a tree. You probably made a straight line with sticks poking out of it, and you may have put in some bubbles representing leaves too.
