trouble doing blind contour drawings

[royaltea]

hey guys, sorry if this is the wrong forum for this but it looked like the most appropriate one.

so i bought "the natural way to draw" and i have been trying to follow that since about the summer. i do not have three hours during the day (or the patience\discipline) to follow the schedules strictly as they are so i try to just do a mix of blind contour drawings and gesture drawings every day.

but i am having a ton of trouble with contour drawings as they seem to fluctuate in quality, sometimes they will be really good other times gross deformations. i have realized my main problem is that my eye cannot exactly follow a line smoothly, it will make small jumps which will really throw off my proportion. i guess i would describe it as, if im reading i cannot smoothly go from letter to letter but rather jump from word to word. i am not sure if this makes sense but an example of this would be that i cannot draw a simple square successfully if i am attempting to do it blindly, the sides will always be different lengths and such. i am not sure if this is normal or if this can be trained.

if it can be trained i have not been able to beat it yet and it is frustrating to realize it is happening as it is going on and it really discourages me from drawing even though i know i need to in order to get better.

i wonder if anyone with any experience with blind contour drawings could share with me if they have experienced the same difficulties

[Elwell]

Blind contour drawings never look good, unless you cheat. If you're getting discouraged because your drawings are all distorted, you're totally missing the point. Part of the purpose of the blind contour exercize is to get away from focusing on results and more into focusing on process. You're not doing them to produce finished drawings, you're doing them to help train your eye and hand.

[Eux]

You really gotta follow the shedule if you are doing that book. And really spent time on the 1 hours conture drawings (or worse th 5 hour one) And it will really really pay off. You wont be able to draw a masterpiece but if you follow through you should be able to get away withotu any major errors but tons of minors but the point is the trainign. The most important part I found wa sthat to really do spend the 30 min and 1 hour on a single object and not a to advanced one moving really really slowely with eye and pen. The book follows up and gives you new isntructions and tips when It belvies you have done the practice so just dig it in :)

[Lukias]

I think we can safely say that not doing blind contour will have any drastic effect on your ability to get a better hold of sketching.
Like many techniques they have their benefits but some are meagre.. I doubt many of the great artists on these boards have really ever invested much time on blind contour drawing.
But Elwell is on the money anyway.. its process over results.

[arttorney]

The exercise is to help you concentrate on the thing you are drawing (and as Elwell said, on the act of drawing itself) not on the appearance of the drawing you are making.

Regardless of how the individual drawings look or what anybody might say about this particular technique it has the following real world result: you get used to drawing without watching the graphite come off the end of your pencil.

Why care about that? Because, unless you can afford a Cintiq, when you draw digitally you will use a tablet that shows the marks on a screen instead of coming out of the end of your pencil. You kind of have to draw without looking at your hand.

Don't worry too much if the end drawing looks kind of funky. Those other drawings you make while you are actually paying attention to where your pencil is should hopefully improve in the long run. You will also be a lot more comfortable learning to draw with a tablet. (And if it helps any, I have found that if you pick certain subject matters to draw with blind contour they usually look pretty good, and certain other subject matters usually look pretty bad. It might not be you who is at the root of the variability, but instead the nature of the thing you are drawing in any given instance. Things like squares and cubes are hard to freehand even if you are looking straight at your drawing.)

[royaltea]

thanks for the replies guys. thinking about this and listening your responses gave me a different perspective. since i started "the natural way to draw" i haven't done regular drawings outside of the contours and the gestures. i had grown frustrated because i wasn't seeing any progress but i now see i missed the point of these drawings. after i made that post i drew regularly for the first time in months and i was fairly pleased with my skill after i finished it. i think i had been ignoring these regular drawings for too long and it is these drawings that encourage me as i am actually able to see progress in them.

so i am going to stick with both the contours and the gestures but also i am going to start drawing regularly again

[briggsy@ashtons]

For what it's worth, I think blind contour is an absolutely crucial exercise for training sensitivity in drawing. Most beginning students, and many very advanced ones, draw using outlines that suffer from various pathologies - the wiry line, the hairy line, the hopeful-flick line, the graphite superhighway ... These pathologies arise because the student is so concerned with getting the outline in the right spot that they can only think of it as the edge of an image, and not what it really is - a horizon. In blind contour the student is freed from the need to get the line in the right spot, and so can concentrate entirely on drawing with the feeling of gliding sensitively along a subtly undulating plane that is edge-on to their line of sight. Later they can learn to draw with this feeling in a "real" drawing, this time by first solving the problem of where the line has to go with a light gestural-constructional foundation, and then drawing sensitive contours, having the same feeling as the blind contour, but now in phrases coordinated with this foundation.

http://djcbriggs.googlepages.com/gino150copy.jpg

I suspect that arttorney is right about the exercise also making it easier to take up drawing on a conventional tablet; I can't prove it but I think it helped a lot in may case - anyway, I did find drawing with a tablet completely natural from day one, despite taking it up at my advanced age.

[enrigo]

Much thanks Briggsy ! That clears up my mind about the benefits of blind contour since it doesn't look entirely related to the skills needed in a "real drawing" without the explanation.