This lesson, and 49 others are found in my book, "Fifty K-12 Art Lessons" available HERE and on Amazon HERE.

​Blind contour drawing is a technique used by both Matisse and Picasso and is a great way to build eye-hand coordination. As you work, the brain makes new connections. Just like weight-lifting is important to athletes, blind drawing is a great exercise for artists to grow in their skills. Though it's called "blind drawing" you actually need to look very carefully... at the subject, the thing you are drawing, and not your hands. After much practice, you'll observe that your blind drawings become less and less abstract. They will never look photographic, but you will see more realistic details emerge as you work. You will see improvement over weeks and months, but the real improvement is over years, which is why starting early is always best!

You might think it odd that a technique that produces such abstract & weird drawings would help your realism, but it does!Experts in their field, like Picasso, Michael Jordan, Cristiano Ronaldo, Serena Williams, or Lady Gaga were not born with their skills, they put in many hours of hard work!

Below is a blind drawing, and the next one is a painting I did. Yes, it's a painting and not a photograph. I was not a "great" artist in high school, I struggled, but blind drawing helped me improve so my portraits went from being "human-like" to realistic. This takes time. 

Blind drawing can be fully blind, where you never look at your pencil or pen. They can also be semi-blind, where you look only to place your pencil or pen down, but never as you draw. If you want a very abstract result, try fully blind! It's fun, and the results are silly... but if you look closely you can see if you caught the essence of the lines. Did you catch the curves and angles? Did you go slowly to see the details of edges? Did you rush and scribble some parts?

Blind drawing is both easy and hard. It's serious and silly. It builds skills, but looks unreal. Some artists force their work to be abstract, and it can seem "forced" or unnatural. The great thing about blind drawing is that the abstraction is both honest and natural.
 
Bind drawing can be applied in many ways. I generally have my students work in pen directly. I don't allow pencil lines... why use a pencil if you're not supposed to look anyway? We try fully blind and semi-blind drawings. Sometimes we even project drawings onto a canvas to make a painting. My top example is a project where we did linear monoprints like Paul Klee did. You can see that lesson HERE. There is no limit to the possibilities of blind drawing.  If students had sketchbooks, I'd suggest a daily (or weekly) 5 minute blind drawing as a warm up.

VIDEO INTRODUCTION

​Comic books have been around since the 1930's and are a great theme to explore for an art project. Famous Funnies, is the first comic book created in the United States, and Action Comics was the first Super Hero Comic Book. That first edition is worth over $3,000,000!

The video below will walk you through my introduction and exploration of comic book covers as a lesson for art students. I encourage them to sketch out ideas first, and seek out peer and teacher feedback before starting on a final version. Parody can be a fun hook to gain student interest, or a mash-up of characters that might not normally meet. Students who have already developed their own characters might want to make a more serious professional version. Students could also be tasked to create themselves as a character, hero or the villain. Those who dabble in Japanese Anime style art can certainly express their style in this lesson. I encourage students to be as original as possible, as that is included in my rubric.
 
My book, "The Art Student's Workbook" includes some project planning pages for this exploration and rubrics. 

Video Introduction:

Racism is a cancer. We have tried bandaids, aspirin, holistic approaches, and even to ignore it. This country is coming to a point, I feel, where we are ready to deal with it...

To get at cancer it needs to be explored fully, understood fully, and be cut out which will cause pain, and some surrounding tissue may be damaged... but in the end there will be healing.

Certainly, while people have cancer they might buy a nice outfit, get a facial, or take a trip... something nice we can all recognize... but as the cancer is rooted out we need to acknowledge the pain and deal with it.

That's what's happening now in the country. As teachers, if we can't see that, recognize it, understand, and teach with that in mind, then we are doomed to not fully educate the next generation.

By Eric Gibbons - Author of ArtEdGuru.com 

If you do not believe racism is a systemic issue, because you have never seen it, this video may be helpful in understanding a small sliver of the "black experience."

This puzzle collage technique is a fun way to explore collage without the usual waste of paper. Optimally, students will need at least 4 layers of paper, including the upper drawing paper. If you use foil, I have found spray gluing it to drawing paper makes it far easier to work with. I do this and roll them with a printing brayer. Sometimes I let the foil wrinkle on purpose for texture. This is also a good opportunity to use op old cups of paint. Just brush old colors onto scrap paper or drawing paper so you have some painted paper textures to include. Variety makes this exploration stand out.

Then you need a subject. My video shows how to use the technique, but how you apply it is up to you. Any linear drawing can be turned into a collage, but complex drawings can be a problem. Younger students should limit their imagery to be rather simple, high school students can handle more complexity, but even there, I had a student do a dragon with individual scales. There were soooo many tiny pieces, he lost his way and became too frustrated too quickly. We simplified the image and had more success after. With complex images, it's better to cut one piece at a time and glue it to its background paper, or several papers if you want to do more than one version. This is especially helpful if the lesson will go on for several class meetings. Cutting and pasting as you go will be much easier though it can be slow going.

Possible subjects to use:
Still Life Linear Portraits
Simplified landscapes
Movie Poster
Story Illustration
Jabberwocky Poem Stanza Illustration (Or any poem really)
Abstract expressionism: where there is no subject: a cursive name can be re-done as a collage, or a wandering line can be used and cut along to make a nonobjective collage image; perhaps a line based on mood.

Blind drawing is a simple technique to build eye-hand coordination and is one of the best ways to improve realistic drawing skills. This method, made popular by the book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," pulls on methods used by Matisse and Picasso.

I find that using the example of video game playing helps students understand the technique. To not look at your hand while you draw is the same thing gamers do when they play. 

When I was in high school, I had a very hard time achieving a likeness without a grid or tracing. My drawings looked human, but not like the person I was trying to draw. When I learned about blind drawing, I immediately saw a "likeness" in the abstracted lines. There's a Zen-like experience as you become "one with the line."

Over time my own work went from vaguely similar to my subject to people mistaking my work for photographs like the portrait below. 

The images by Matisse and Picasso above are good examples of blind drawing I share with my students and in the video above. If I was able to run a drawing only course, I would have my students start each day with a 10 minute blind drawing as a warm-up. My experience shows me this is one of the best skill building techniques out there. I like going a bit further sometimes with the drawings and adding crosshatching or color to them. In my early days as an artist, I would transfer my blind drawings to large canvases, like 3 x 5 ft. They were wonderfully pop-art-like. So though this is an exercise, it can become a fully realized work of art depending on where you go with it. (Samples of my work below)

As an educator, what have you done, or what do you plan to do to address the Black Lives Matter movement?

For me, a teacher in an urban school, I am VERY conscientious of choosing a diverse set of artists to pull from as examples. If it's always "dead white guys," I am sending a message. This is also why my "If Picasso" series of books is purposefully diverse.

I also review my discipline reports and grades, carefully, to be sure I am not acting out of bias. Do my numbers match my classes demographics? Is one group less or more likley to get positive or negative attention? I may assume I am not, but I "check the data." I like to think I am "woke," and I am in some ways, but I also know there is a lot I do not know. As educators, in some ways, we set the stage for what is to come. If the roots of the trees we grow are given stagnate soil, how can we expect them to grow to their full potential. We need to check, at least once in a while, our practice, and see if the data shows we have acted fairly or based on biases we have not given light.

​Because I shared a home with African Americans for many years, I witnessed some of these disparities. I would never claim to "understand" their whole experience based on those few years, but what I do know is that "the system" is built on and perpetuates inequality. I have no doubt of that, which is why I work to bring balance in my life, my classroom, and perhaps my school.

Author, Kimberly Jones, explains the underlying reasons for the Black Lives Matter movement. Her full statement is on Youtube but may not be appropriate for school due to her strong and passionate language. 

At the five minute mark she says:
How Can You Win
You can’t win.
The game is fixed.
So when they say, "Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?"
It’s not ours! We don’t own anything! We don’t own anything!

Trevor Noah said it so beautifully… 'there’s a social contract that we all have–that if you steal or if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us!'

So the social contract is broken!
And if the social contract is broken, why the F#*k do I give a sh*t about burnin’ the F#*kin' football hall of fame, about burnin' a F#*kin’ Target?
You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a F#*k!

You broke the contract, for four hundred years when we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract, when we built our wealth, again on our own by our bootstraps in Tulsa, and you dropped bombs on us. When we built it in Rosewood and you came in and slaughtered us.

You broke the contract, so F#*k your Target, F#*k your Hall of Fame.

Far as I’m concerned they can burn this b*tch to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough.

And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.” 

This is the reality, and the BLM movement is the responce. 

So again I ask, as an educator, what have you done, or what do you plan to do to address the Black Lives Matter movement?