Eye’s off your paper! The brussels sprouts of art class is back and it’s good for you, I swear.
Blind contour drawing. I fraking HATED doing these in high school. Why am I wasting my time drawing these freakshow elephantitus hands? Why do I have to do this in front of everyone? Everyone’s gonna see that I suck at drawing! I’ll just take a quick peek down…
I was a moron. Nobody cares. Photographers don’t show you every picture from a shoot, just the awesome ones. So if it really bothers you like it did me back then, throw away (or recycle) the paper after you finish.
Blind contour drawing’s an exercise. A vital exercise. And like holding horse stance in martial arts, you’ll never actually use it in real life. What you will use is the skills and strengths you develop from doing it.
Teachers will tell you how blind contour drawing will improve your hand-eye coordination. Ugh. Hand-eye coordination is one of those irritatingly general and ultimately nebulous terms, like scientist.
Now, yes, blind contour drawing will improve your brain’s ability to correlate visual input with the locomotion of your hand, arm and shoulder. However, that’s not the specific advantage of blind contour drawing (you could draw looking at your paper and develop hand-eye coordination). So what’s the advantage?
Two overlooked faculties of the human mind are kinesthesia and proprioception. Kinesthesia is the body’s awareness of motion in the body and proprioception is the body’s awareness of the position of the body. Both of these senses work exclusive of vision, but they are usually trumped by your vision. Take your ability to balance. Balance is achieved when your brain combines proprioception, sight, and equilibrioception (inner ear). Stand on one foot with your eyes open, you’re probably fine. Close your eyes, and now your body has to rely on your sense of proprioception, and you’ll probably lose balance pretty quick. Now try the same thing while swinging your leg and see how good your kinesthesia is. In both cases, when your senses of kinesthesia and proprioception aren’t strong, your body doesn’t quite know what’s going on without your eyes, and can’t send the proper impulses to your muscles to establish balance.
The importance of kinesthesia and proprioception is that you can be aware of what your body is doing without looking. Blind contour drawing develops these skills.
But why bother? The less you have to look, the better you will be. Think of dancers and gymnasts – they don’t have to look behind them to make sure they’ve lifted their leg to the right angle to make a certain line. They know. The tools you use to create art should be wielded just as effortlessly and confidently. So when you’re doing a life drawing, you don’t have to look down as much to reorient yourself and you can spend more time studying the object you’re drawing. It also helps when drawing from imagination – I usually do all my sketches and thumbnails blind, or using my peripheral vision.
So grab some paper and free up your hand. I recommend using a felt pen or real soft lead, like a 4B. Start by just doing the outline of your hand in one continuous line:
Do a few til you feel comfortable to move on. It looks like shit, I know. Getting it ‘right’ can take hours or it can take days. Be patient, but not too patient. If your suckiness plateaus, it’s time to move on.
So if you’re good to move on, keep drawing continuous line, but start dipping in and getting some details, separating fingers, getting nails, etc:
For you advanced students, no more continuous line. I know some teachers say look down every time you pick up your pen/cil. I say that’s for suckas. Don’t look down ’til you’re done:
Remember, unless you’re the best artist since evar, these drawings will look like you drew them with your left hand (or right if you’re leftie, or foot if you’re ambidextrous). If you’re having problems, I recommend setting a timer, 30 seconds to a minute per drawing. Somehow a ticking bomb helps.
If you’re REALLY off mark with your drawings, I invite you to peak, but not look, at your drawing. No more than twice per drawing and for less than a second – a flick of the eye. All you want is a quick snapshot in your head. Don’t stare, and don’t abuse this little allowance, as it defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.
So find a recycle bin and get going.
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