After spending the last few weeks threatening to give my life drawing comfort zone a shake-up, and not actually doing owt about it, I finally put my pencil where my mouth is (so to speak) and ended up having a really satisfying session as a result. Started off with some standard 5 minute pose charcoal sketches...
The second one triggered a "ah! yes! that's how they're supposed to look!" with a sense of flow but the others still have that uncertainty, that lack of weight or purpose that's been bugging me thus far. Foreseeing another patchy session like the last one, and determined not to slip into the usual safety zone of using a whole lot of tone to cover up a bad drawing, I finally did what I should've done weeks ago - GO BLIND.
You'd be forgiven for wondering what the bloody hell I'm babbling about and whether I've taken leave of my life drawing senses to produce the above scrawl and stick it online. It is, in fact, a blind contour drawings of the life model - a drawing produced without ever looking at the drawing until it's finished. There's a reason for this, honest...
Blind contour drawing is something that I first encountered in Betty Edwards' remarkably effective Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and then during life drawing sessions whilst studying animation. Basically, a key problem when trying to draw from observation (whether that be self-portrait, nude model, still life) is that your brain doesn't want to draw what's exactly being seen by the eyes but instead reaches into the memory banks and brings up a 'clip art' of what you're drawing. For example, if you're drawing a self-portrait of yourself at a 3/4 angle in the mirror, when it comes to drawing the eyes the brain will insist on using the generic 'symbol' or 'shape' of an eye, rather than drawing exactly how the eye looks in the mirror. Which sounds a bit bizarre, but consider times when you've seen drawings by non-artists or people just starting to learn how to draw, the way that eyes and mouths are always flat-on, almost cubist-style, even when they're clearly not meant to be, simply because the artist's brain wanted a drawing of an eye rather than a drawing of what was being seen. The same happens with the rest of the body - you can be drawing a hand and inadvertently find yourself drawing what you think the hand should look like, rather than what it actually does look like, and in doing so killing the picture.
This may all sound quite peculiar to non-artists but if you're the kind of person who insists "I can't draw!" a) have a go at a self-portrait and see if you do the above and b) BUY THIS BOOK. Seriously, you follow the exercises and it works like a charm. You can see examples of how people have drawn before such exercises and after here - a perfect demonstration of how people end up drawing symbols when they mean to drawing what they see. Blind contour drawing is a way of rebooting the brain, of stopping oneself from unconsciously ignoring what you're meant to be drawing - on top of that, it's also a great way of stopping yourself from getting over-precious of every single goddamn drawing. You get your page, you place your pencil/pen-nib at a point on the page where you want to start drawing, and you position yourself so you can't actually see the page, only the model/mirror/object you're drawing (an easel is a godsend for this). And you draw, essentially moving the pen as your eyes follow the lines of the face/body/object, as though there's an invisible connection between the focus of your vision and the nib of your pen, following the contours of the body/face/object. It helps to be using a black pen, with no variation in tone or thickness, and drawing on cheap newsprint paper kills off any sense of preciousness.
Look at the images above and you can see the result, the way that details and little lines that might previously be ignored are instead noticed and drawn, so that you have something that doesn't look like the subject you're drawing but, oddly, feels like the subject, a bizarre exaggerated caricature of a form. This is especially noticeable when blind drawing a hand, a foot, a cabbage. In the process, it reminds you that you should be drawing only what you see directly in front of you, that the majority of your drawing time should be spent looking at the object of your attentions, not the page, and to put more trust in making marks 'unsupervised' (ie when you're not looking at the page while drawing) and appreciating the benefits of doing so.
Pleased with the above and the palpable mental shift the process brought with it, I spent the rest of the session doing a blind drawing of each pose, then another where I'd allow myself to look at the page now and then to ensure proportions and placing on the page stayed consistent - in most of the cases, I find myself preferring the blind version to the following 'assisted' version, but the below was when it clicked properly, having the confidence to just let a single line describe an upper torso despite the urge to overwork - there's something bizarrely scary about committing to just one line, can't quite describe it, but when you override it and the result works, it's a treat.
That, and the longer pose that followed, would never have turned out as well as it did without the blind drawings that preceded them. It's quite fascinating feeling this shift in perception going on in your noggin, hard though it is to put into words (as the above attempt no doubt demonstrates). I had naively assumed that my days of contour drawing were behind me, that I'd learned the lessons and made the mental shift, but yesterday proved to me that's not the case. Indeed, I should think of such drawings as the equivalent of musical scales for musicians - not something you'd perform as a finished piece, but as a tool that enhances your ability to produce those finished pieces. And even though that final piece does go back to the comfort zone of tone, I'm happy with the linear drawing of the pose, the lines cleaner and more assured than previous weeks. The initial blind drawing almost acts as the problem-solving drawing, figuring out the correct angles and details, so the following piece is drawn with those problems considered, if only at a subconscious level, somehow taking the worry and uncertainty out of it.








Recent Comments