

#Easy contour flower drawing how to#
Skillshare instructor and artist Kim Victoria demonstrates how to draw a traditional contour line drawing.Ī traditional contour line drawing can be any type of line sketch. There are several types of contour drawings, but blind contour line drawing is the only one that requires you to not look down at your paper and focus entirely on your subject.


Your eyes will likely start to feel tired and you’ll begin to lose concentration if you work for much longer! The Difference Between a Contour Drawing and a Blind Contour Drawing While there’s no time limit for you to work on your contour line art, you may choose to set a timer for 20-30 minutes if you’re using this as a warm-up exercise or if you’re new to this technique.
#Easy contour flower drawing series#
Blind contour line drawings help to improve your hand-eye coordination and your artistic observational skills.īy not looking down at your paper, you’re forced to see your subject as a series of lines and shapes rather than, say, a face with a nose and eyes. You look at your subject then look down to draw it-not from what you see in front of you in that exact moment but from the memory of having just looked at it. Think about how you approach a typical drawing: much of it is done from short-term memory. The primary goal of blind contour drawing is to focus your attention on what you’re actually seeing in front of you, rather than what you think you’re seeing. Your final drawing is usually not very realistic and can look a little messy, but that’s exactly how it’s meant to be! What’s the Purpose of This Technique? It’s a great technique for beginner artists to use when focusing on observational skills, and it builds an excellent foundation for more complex artistic adventures later on. The blind contour line drawing technique was first used in the 1920s and 1930s, brought to mass attention in the art world in Kimon Nicolaïdes 1941 book, The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study. The final piece is made up of one continuous line as the pencil or pen stays on the paper so that the artist doesn’t lose where they are or need to look down. When thinking about a blind contour drawing definition, it’s most commonly described as a technique where the artist continually looks at their subject while completing the drawing and is “blind” to their work before it’s completed.

Blind contour drawings are made from one continuous line and completed without looking at your paper. The word itself comes from the French contour, which means outline or shape, and is used to describe the lines that make up the outside edge of a drawing. You may be familiar with what a contour is already, but if not then that’s a good place to start. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand the blind contour drawing definition, why this differs from other types of contour line drawings, and how you can start working on your own blind contour line art pieces straight away. While some of this is natural, it’s definitely possible to level-up your observational skills and improve your artwork as a result.īlind contour drawing is one exercise that you can use to see all of the details and really look at your subject rather than drawing from memory. The greatest artists are often the best observers, noticing shapes and lines in ways that others don’t.
