Blind Contour Drawing

 

Blind Contour Drawing is an exercise where the artist does not look at the paper while drawing the contour or outline of an object or person.

Fifth and sixth grade artists created Blind Contour Portraits. Some students chose to add color.

Blind contour drawings

Fifth and sixth grade artists learned about blind contour drawings. The biggest challenges for them were keeping their pens on the paper and not peeking at their artwork. After making several blind contour drawings with different partners, students chose one to color. They looked for closed spaces within their contour line drawings and colored the spaces with colored pencils. This is preparation for working on self portraits. I am trying to get students to draw what they see instead of what they know. Hopefully this exercise helps students draw more freely.