Are you sick and tired of seeing my pictures and hearing me ramble on about the right side of the brain yet? I hope not, ’cause here comes some more. 😀
Well, since Saturday, I’ve done quite a bit with some very complicated Contour Drawing exercises. The overall recipe goes something like this:
- Draw a horizontal and vertical axis onto the paper to match the plastic picture plane.
- Take the graphite stick that I bought at Curry’s art store and rub it over the paper to ‘tone’ it to a shade of dark silver or light gray. Use a paper towel to rub away any extra graphite.
- Use the plastic picture plane to get an outline of the subject I want to draw, in temporary marker, keeping only one eye open to avoid stereoscopic confusion.
- Put the plastic picture plane against a white paper background to see the lines clearly, and copy the marks onto the paper in pencil as well as I can.
- Then return to the original subject, from as close to the original perspective as possible, and refine or add detail to the pencil drawing as much as possible. Use the one-eye technique again.
It’s been very interesting. For the first go-round, I did another marker outline of my hand:
And from that, I made the toned drawing like this:
My second ‘subject’ was my sunglasses. This proved to be a bit of a difficulty, as I couldn’t rest the plastic plane on them as easily as I could on my hand. I tried to hold it steady with my free hand, but I ended up relying more on direct observation than the picture plane for this one and the next one:
Yesterday, I used a whisk, and decided to skip the step of toning the paper, since I wasn’t sure how much the toning was adding to the end result. (Though I liked how I was able to outline the hand by erasing some of the tone just around the edges of my palm and fingers.)
And today, I tried my hand again, but holding another object, a flash drive. Here’s the picture plane. You’ll have to wait a few days to find out how the drawing worked out:
The Kelworth Files 