Video: Blind Contour Sketch Exercise

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Blind contour sketch exercises will force you to concentrate on the subject matter and not your drawing. Learn how to properly draw a blind contour with advice from an artist in this free instructional drawing video.

- Basic Contour Sketch Exercise

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Video Transcript

One of the exercises that can help you train your eye to look at things the way they actually are instead of just drawing say symbols of the way you remember them to be is called a blind contour. What you're going to do is you're going to pick an object. I picked a teddy bear, and you're going to draw the bear, or whatever it is that you pick, and you're not going to look at your paper. You're going to force yourself to concentrate only on the part of you looking at what you're drawing, and as you trace with your eye the outlines and the curves of whatever it is that you're drawing you're going to be continuing to do that on the paper too. Part of what's so good about this exercise is you're not going to be self conscious about what you're drawing on the paper because it's not going to look good. You know that in the end and so you don't have that pressure of trying to make something look good and you're worried about whether or not it will. So I'm going to start with the bear. I'm going to start right here at the crease between the ear and the top of the head. I'm not looking at the paper. I see the curve. I see it come around to the other ear and I see a little tiny crease right here and I see fur coming out of the ear, and then I follow that down and there's a slight curve on the bottom side of the chin all around to the bottom of the face up to the other side of the head and here comes the other ear. It's like a semi circle on top but then it tapers down at the bottom, and then inside I can see the fur coming out a little bit too. Now I'm going to draw the eye. It's not a perfect circle so I'm not going to draw a perfect circle. I can tell it's kind of crowded by the fur. So it's kind of like that, and then the nose it's making a crease that's kind of a triangular crease almost all the way around, and then the eye on the other side is more circular but there is still fur crowding it, and then make the nose in the middle just kind of like a big oval that has these threads going across. It has a frown on it's mouth and then we can come down and do the arm and I see the body kind of come out of that. Then I see the leg and the foot and all I'm doing is I'm just tracing exactly what I see with my eyes. I'm not looking at the paper. I'm just kind of guessing where I'm supposed to put my pencil next because what I want to do right now is focus on the looking and noticing all those little tiny things that make the bear look realistic instead of like a cartoon. Noticing, you know, it's not exactly symmetrical. Okay so here's my blind contour. It doesn't look anything like a teddy bear but that's not what it's about. It's not about what you end up with. It's about training your eye to be able to see and focus on those tiny little details and notice that the eyes aren't shaped like perfect spheres. They aren't perfect little round buttons. So that's a blind contour drawing.

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Blind Contour Sketch Exercise

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