Blind Drawing

"Honest" abstraction & Skill Building Through Contour Lines

​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