1-25-15_4

Observational Drawing

Week 1: Assignment 2 Discussion

Assignment 2: Drawing Exercise—Modified Contour Study
By Wednesday, January 21, 2015, complete a modified contour line drawing of your hand, opposite your drawing hand, holding an object. This drawing should take approximately 10–15 minutes.
Begin by setting up your drawing paper on a vertical surface such as a drawing board leaning against the back of a chair or an easel, so that it's parallel to the picture plane. Make sure your paper is secure and will not move. Place your paper 90 degrees away from your body, so that your subject is outside of your peripheral vision.
Place your pencil on your paper and draw the contour of your opposite hand holding an object by pretending your eyes are an ant crawling very slowly along the contours and cross-contours of your subject. Your eyes and your hand should be moving together at the same slow speed.
Look at your paper as often as you like to orient yourself but do not move the pencil while you're looking at your paper.
Keep your eyes on your subject and slowly draw one continuous line. Do not lift your pencil off the paper, except to reposition it if you get too far from where the contour line should actually be.
Pick out every detail. This exercise is designed to train your eye to see all the variations of the contour of an object. It is also an exercise in hand-eye coordination to train your hand and eye to move together.
Again, this may feel very uncomfortable to you—but force yourself to do it. Remember, this is about the process of visual investigation, not necessarily a finished drawing.
Create several drawings if need be. Make adjustments, but keep your pencil on the paper at all times!

 My Work:

I have taken this class  previously so this time I made sure to get as much out of the assignments as possible to do my best. I wasn’t really successful with the continuous line drawing method because I sketch from time to time and the urge to lift my pencil was immense. I had to redo this assignment a few times and then ended up actually completing it while in a doctor office waiting room on a paper that wasn’t even my sketch pad. I had a focused moment and just went with it. This was much harder than I initially thought it would be.


Contour drawing has many different types, I had never tried blind contour drawing before, but after reading the lectures and watching the videos, I have come to learn that blind contour drawing is where you don’t look at the paper at all while drawing, keeping your eyes on the subject and drawing what you see without looking at the shapes you’re actually drawing. Not that you don’t care what the final outcome is, but that you want to be able to put what you see onto the paper without modifying the outcome by trying to correct yourself and not actually getting the idea of the feel of the subject.


Cross contour drawing isn’t just drawing the basic outline of a subject. It’s the drawing of all the edges of the entire subject in actual dimension, outline, front, bottom, top, all edges around the entire subject. Not necessarily so the finished product looks like an apple, ball. Block, egg, etc. but that the viewer can look at the finished product and see, and understand that there’s a sense of proportion and dimension of the subject, no matter what it is.

My Instructor's Feedback: (Third Image)

Click the small boxes in the bottom right and find the third image and click, press play and listen.