From Maureen Innes -Visual arts lesson year 4>

BLIND CONTOUR DRAWING

ARRGHH! But I CAN’T draw!!!!!

Drawing can be stressful to us as both learners and teachers. You may believe that you yourself cannot draw, and sadly, you are bound to encounter students who have convinced themselves that they also cannot draw for a wide and varied range of reasons.

Let’s make this point very clear…

BEING ABLE TO DRAW DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU CAN DRAW A PERFECTLY REALISTIC IMAGE OF SOMETHING!! IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE A ‘GOOD’ OR ‘SUCCESSFUL’ DRAWING, IT DOES NOT HAVE TO LOOK LIKE A PHOTGRAPH!!

Besides, what is the point of drawing something that looks just like a photograph? We have cameras these days to do that job!

Drawing can be anything. It can be incredibly simple. It can be an impression or an expression of something.

I would like to present you with an effective ways to break that mindset of feeling the need to draw exact replicas of things.

Blind Drawing

This is a very quick and fun (although potentially a little unsettling and difficult!) activity for you to do yourself or with your class of students. You will need an art journal or blank reflex or cartridge paper, and a 2B or 6B pencil for this exercise. To extend this activity into the next stage, you will need some coloured pencils.

Step 1: Open your visual diary to a blank page. Place the hand that you do not draw with in front of your face, about 30 centimetres from your eyes, or at whatever distance is comfortable for you to see it clearly.

Step 2: Turn your body away from your page and drawing hand so that you cannot see the page. You might like to secure your page on the table with some tape or blu-tack if you are using a single sheet.

Step 3: Place you drawing hand on your blank page with your pencil ready

Step 4: Look at your hand in front of your face. Begin to draw your hand without looking at your drawing hand or your page. Your pencil must not leave the page, nor may your eyes move from the hand in front of your face. No cheating! RESIST THE URGE TO LOOK AT WHAT YOU ARE DRAWING!!

Step 5: Have a look at your ‘handiwork’. It should look pretty crazy. Maybe it will look something like this (I’ve done one using my drawing tool)

The purpose of this activity to engage communication and connection between visual perception and fine motor skills. You are drawing what you SEE rather than what you KNOW. You will desperately want to look at your page and raise your pencil, but you must resist! In a class situation, kids really get a laugh out of the drawings they create. They will all look crazy. This is a great drawing ‘ice breaker’ to remove some of the self –imposed pressure many students will place upon themselves to draw ‘realistically’.

Step 6: As an extension, you can have a go yourself at turning your ‘hand’ drawing into a weird creature, by giving it a beak or eyes for example, or by filling in parts with experimental patterns.  Have a look at this link to a bird pun drawing activity (Princeton Online: The Incredible Art Department). You might be able to use the blind contour drawing you have made of your hand to get you started on your own bird or any other animal ‘visual pun’.