Video: Basic Contour Sketch Exercise

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A basic contour sketch exercise uses only lines with no shadows. Learn more about contour sketches with advice from an artist in this free instructional drawing video.

- Basic Contour Sketch Exercise

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Video Transcript

After you get passed doing just plain exercises, you're going to do one more. It's halfway in between exercise and an actual drawing because what we're going to do, is we're going to do not a blind contour but a contour drawing. We're just going to draw all the lines that we see on the bear here. We're not going to try to focus on any of the shadows. We just want to get all the shapes and all the proportions right. So, one technique that I'm going to use is I'm going to use big kind of shapes; big shapes to start out with and then I'm going to go in and make them more specific and modify them. So they look more like the subject I'm trying to draw. So, I see the body. The body is kind of like a circle and I see the two feet in front and they're like little ovals that are set from my perspective, they're about, one-third of the oval is inside of the circle and one-third of it is not and they're kind of off to the side. So here's one and here's the other one and this one's kind of going off. The foot is going underneath and this oval's inside and this is just real, real kind of basic. We're just trying to get the main shape. This kind of tapers up to the top here. There's a line where the head meets the body and then we have the arms coming off. They kind of overlap on the body a little bit and from my perspective once again it's about a third of the arm is going to be overlapping on the body. I'm kind of drawing things that I can't even see. I'm drawing the body that goes behind the arm a little bit here and I can see this seam right here going around the front of the hand. There's a seam going across the neck. I'm also going to add in the arm here. Once again the arm is probably about a third of the way in front of the body. So, I'm going to add that in the drawing; and you can see the seam coming right along the bottom here. You can almost see it up here. So, then from there, we've got the bottom part. Those are a little bit small and then we're going to move to the head and looking at the head and the body, the head is actually about the same size as the body and that's one of the things where you have to pay really close attention to whatever it is that you're drawing because a lot of the time, your mind is going to jump to conclusions like, Oh well bears have smaller heads than their bodies and then you're going to end up with a drawing that doesn't look anything that you're trying to draw. So, I'm just trying to focus on getting all the proportions right here. I'm not really looking for an accurate depiction and then the nose takes up about half of the face, if you look right there. It's about half of the entire face and it's kind of like an upside down triangle almost. Draw a little bit smoother; and the very tip of the nose is right in the middle and once again I'm not shading. There's a hint of a little bit of a frown there. And then the eyes are kind of sunken in on the sides here. This one's really hard to see because he's kind of off to the side here. So, I'm just going to put a little bit of one there and then I can see a lot more of this one and that is the basic idea of how to get a contour drawing done.

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Basic Contour Sketch Exercise

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