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Similar to the Upside Down Drawing Exercise, 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 Blind Contour.
Exercise: Create a drawing
just using lines; no shading
Without looking at your paper
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
What does this improve:
hand-eye coordination
attention to detail
train yourself to draw what you see as opposed to "how it should look"
While doing this exercise, you may find the hardest part is not the drawing, but trusting your hand eye coordination and resisting the urge to look at the paper.
The image above is an attempt to do this with my hand. Haven't done one in years. This took me about 3 minutes. I used a Stabilo pen. Probably could have gone slower and captured more details like the wrinkles around the knuckles.
You can see the spots where I pick up my pen. In these cases, its really hard keep continuity. A trick I used is having the pencil over as I trace my eyes on my hand from where I stopped drawing to where I begin again.
Here is my setup. Maybe not the most interesting hand pose, but wanted a pose where my hand would be supported.
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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