Draw on This—Day Eight Blind Contours and Scribbles

Today as a fun warm up! I challenged my students with BLIND CONTOUR DRAWING while looking at an array of objects. We had ice cube trays, a wooden drawing mannequin, shoes, a lantern and a spray bottle. Lots of the students resisted this idea but I encouraged them to see this as a fun exercise.

Blind contour is using lines to draw the outside edges of the shapes seen in an object WITHOUT looking at your paper. This is a great exercise to practice looking at objects and focusing in on truly seeing that object and not just drawing what we think it should look like. The result often looks like a spaghetti mess. Some of our results today are a little too good... hmm, I suspect that I had some cheaters!

Once our warm up was complete, I showed my students a way of drawing that is rather opposite to contours. Instead of the outlines of and object, we used scribbles to create bulk and mass and build up our drawing subject. And for today’s subject, we have... the tree:

Scribbles are great fun to draw with and are especially great for these trees as they can easy look like rough bark on a tree trunk, busy leaves or pine tree needles. Check out some of these great drawings from the students today:

What else can we use scribbles for? I am so glad you asked! How about human hair? Using tight, small scribbles I showed my students how to use scribbles to create a fun head of hair in this drawing of a boy:

In encouraging my students to try to do scribble hair today, I also had the opportunity to talk about proportions of the face. After some simple instructions, I let them loose to create their own. Here are the results!—