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Similar to the Upside Down Drawing Exercise & Blind Contour, this exercise will help you become a better drawer, by training you to become a better seer. There are many types of contour drawings: Blind Contour, Continuous Line Contour, Modified line Contour, and Cross Contour. This blog will walk through Continuous Contour.
Exercise: Create a drawing
just using lines; no shading
with or without looking at your paper
Do not pick up your pencil; Drawing should be one long line.
Tips
Go slowly
Pretend your eyes are your pencil following every edge of the subject and that your pencil is just following the movement of your eyes.
Capture the details
If you hard gets tired you can pick it up but pick up where you left off.
What does this improve:
hand-eye coordination
attention to detail
study edges
train yourself to draw what you see as opposed to "how it should look"
The image above is an attempt to do this with a photo of John Lennon as a reference. This took me about 15 minutes. I used a Stabilo pen.
I did play around with slightly thicker and thinner lines here or there and go over some of the lines again to retrace my steps.
If you want to start your painting journey, I've put together a list of all my go to supplies to get you started.
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