homework

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Homework For Pure Contour Drawing.

If you can't keep your eyes off your drawing paper or if you're tired of craning your neck: try one of these simple variations

1) Draw inside of a bag. What? inside a bag? Yes. Very simply, get a big paper bag from the grocery store, (You've probably got a few stuffed in the broom closet. I always save mine). Open it up wide, lay it down on a flat surface and put your drawing paper inside it. This way, you can keep your hand or whatever object you're drawing directly in front of you and you won't be nearly as tempted to look. (at your drawing that is.)

2) Pop a sheet of paper over your pencil, that is, poke the eraser end of your pencil through an 8 1/2 " by 11" sheet of typing paper. Keep the paper above your drawing hand. It'll hang over your hand and your drawing like an umbrella - again, you won't be able to see what you're drawing.

To really get the feel for being deep in R-mode, do three or four more pure contour drawings. Through this exercise, you have the opportunity to get into the quasi-altered state of processing information in your artistic brain. Remember, it's been idling there all this time, all these years, and it's here through these exercises that you can reclaim it. That's a pretty exciting prospect if you ask me.

Do three more pure contour drawings:

Do them of your tennis shoes, a plant, a rock, something with lots of detail that's interesting to you. You could also try any of the following pictures. Send me your drawings if you like and I'll display them right here. Last notes:

Try and give each picture 20 minutes
Use a timer
If you have more time, great!
You don't have to do the whole picture - just do whatever you can in the amount of time you've given yourself.
There's no right or wrong way to do this - just gently record what you see.

A little extra homework

Here are 7 detailed photos of different objects you can draw. In any of them, don't be overwhelmed by color, shading or detail - your hand had every bit as much. And just like you did with the the tiny contours in your hand, seek out shared edges. These are most easily found as simple lines. Pick any edge or line and just follow it into the picture the way you'd take a trail into an unknown forest - knowing it leads somewhere.

None of these are tiny pictures and I've put the kb size next to them. The only way to maintain enough detail to make them worth your while was to leave them fairly large. The originals were 20 to 50 times larger. Don't worry that the entire picture doesn't fit on your screen - it only makes it more difficult to identify and thus serves our purposes all the better.

(Note: In the "Rose" photo, start at the inside and work your way out. The "Tropical Plants" photo is on it's side - I left it that way because it's like an upside-down drawing: L-mode will want to abandon it thus allowing R-mode to take over.)

So here they are. If you only have time to do one extra pure contour drawing, I recommend "Tree Trunks".

Go to Lesson 5

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e-mail: jeffkaz@YouCanDraw