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Blind Contour Drawing - Drawing by Touch

by Carol Rosinski
Example of Blind Contour Drawing

Three Onions
Drawn without looking at the subject.

Blind contour drawing is done by drawing the contour outline of your subject without looking at your paper. (See example at left.) Many artists use blind contour drawing as an exercise to warm up before a drawing session. Drawing is a very special skill; it's all about coordinating your hand to draw what you are truly seeing.

When you take a pencil in your hand and trace the contour of your subject without looking at your paper, you're learning to "feel" the lines of the subject. If your eye sees the line leaning to the right, your hand pulls the pencil to the right. This "feel" of the line is very important. It leaps past logical thinking (which would be saying something to you like "get out a ruler and compass and measure that line exactly") and takes you right into that special zone where you draw what you see without thinking about it.

If you think about what you're drawing too much, you're likely to let your logical brain tell you what it thinks the subject "should" look like, and that is where a good deal of bad drawing comes from. When you draw a bad representation of something, it's because you're drawing what your logical brain "thinks" the subject looks like and not what is truly there. We all have preconceived notions of how things look. Too see what I mean, make a very fast sketch of a tree. You probably made a straight line with sticks poking out of it, and you may have put in some bubbles representing leaves, too.
Three Onions with Shadows

Three Onions
Drawn after warming up with blind contour drawing.

Now, to see what a tree really looks like, take a Dry Erase Marker or wax pencil to a window and trace around the contour of any real tree you see. You will find, at the very least, that the real tree outline is much more complicated than your sketched tree. For one thing, you probably didn't draw any limbs coming straight at you in your sketch. Drawing a line coming at you (foreshortening) is one of the hardest things to draw accurately, and one of the very best ways to draw that sort of line is to learn to "feel" it with your pencil. If you see that it leans a little to the left, your hand pulls your pencil in the same direction and at the same angle.

To draw a subject accurately, you have to draw what is really there. Blind contour drawing makes your logical brain quiet down for a while. It can't try to step in and correct what it can't see and it can't see what your hand is drawing. The outcome of all this blind contour drawing will be that your hand will learn to draw what your eyes are truly seeing by feeling the lines and angles of the subject.

Your blind contour drawings will look awful. Your lines will be all over the place and that's okay. You do need your logical brain to draw accurately, but you just need it a little bit. You need it to glance at your paper and tell you where to start and end your lines, but that's about all you need it for. Most of the time, when you're really drawing, your eyes will be on your subject and not your paper. Just quick glances at your paper to help place the lines are all you really need from your logical brain.

Blind contour drawing forces you to break your habit of doing everything with your logical brain. When you are drawing, that rational part of you needs to become a gentle companion offering sound but infrequent advice. When you break out of your logical thinking mode and just let your sense of seeing and touch take over, magical things begin to happen; you enter the realm of imagination, where true art lives.

© Carol Rosinski 2008
The writing and images on this page are the copyrighted work of Carol Rosinski and cannot be used without her permission.
Purdy the Toad I've been growing Toad Hollow Studio since 1998.