There is a dark / Invisible workmanship that reconciles /Discordant elements, and makes them move / In one society…” “The mind of man is framed even like the breath / And harmony of music.
This famous text revolves around the power the poet’s natural surroundings have on his “mind’s eye,” How do you process what you see? How good are you at looking at your object? Do you get curious about it? Do you ask questions about what you’re looking at? Do you de-construct the image and take it to pieces in front of you? Do you imagine what it would be like to get the 3D onto a 2D shape?Īt the risk of sounding romantic about this the great nineteenth century romantic poets were acutely connected to the impact that their surroundings had on their “mind’s eyes.” One of my favourite texts is The Prelude by Wordsworth. How does your eye communicate the visual to your brain? This pre-step is the activity that takes place between your brain and your eye or vision. We all assume that the act of picking up a pencil and placing it to the paper is the first step. Have you ever stopped to wonder about what happens in your body when you draw? I’m not talking getting relaxed, I’m talking about how your eye, brain, and then body respond to the act of drawing?ĭid you know that becoming conscious of how your body responds to drawing will support you learn to draw? Understanding the physiology of drawing.Of all the basic principles, contour drawing, in my view, is worth spending more time mastering when you are first learning to draw.īut before I do so I want to take an even further step back. Mastering and understanding the concept of a good contour is step 1 in developing a good drawing habit that, within the first moments of your drawing sets out the shape and feel of what you are trying to draw. Many of the comments and feedback I regularly get is “I’d love my drawing to look a little more realistic as opposed to childlike.” “Be guided more by the sense of touch, than by sight.” Kimon Nicolaides in his famous classic book “The Natural Way to Draw,” is a staunch advocate of placing your pencil on the paper whilst imagining you are physically touching the object in front of you, keeping your eyes on the object as opposed to the paper. Grasping the importance of contours is fundamental in moving you beyond childlike drawings. In addition, our perception of edges, (in the case of drawing), where two things come together and the line that depicts this shared edge is known as a contour line. That is an outline.Ī contour conveys the shape, width and thickness of the object it surrounds. Imagine placing your hand down and drawing around it. I’d also add that we must not confuse the concept of an outline with a contour.Īn outline is flat and 2 dimensional. “an outline representing or bounding the shape or form of something.” The dictionary definition of a contour is as follows It’s my number one, go to action point when I get started.Ĭontours are the skeleton of your artwork and if you reach the end of your drawing and feel dissatisfied it is often as a result of the first few strokes of the pencil on the page. I lay down the entire shape on my paper first by capturing its contours. If you’ve ever joined me in person you will know that I pretty much start every drawing session with the contour line in my page, whether fast or slow. The first of the basic 5 drawing principles is known as the contour line. What does contour drawing mean and when should you use it?
What is the logical order in which to get going? That blank piece of paper looks large and daunting. Where exactly do you start to draw and what does this thing called the contour line have to do with anything? So…you’ve picked up a pencil and have a piece of paper.
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