Extended Blind Contour Animal

This is my extended blind contour animal drawing. The objective of this project was to take a toy animal, provided by Mrs. Medsker, and draw it in one continuous line without looking down at the paper and taking my pen of the page. Here I drew four storks, like a little stork family. I decided to fill the storks in with watercolor because I was inspired by the artist who made pen drawings and filled them in with minimalistic watercolor.

I decided to do the stork because as I was drawing many different animals, I realized that my issue with what I was doing wrong happened with the width and the legs of animals. They always started higher than when I stopped, so I figured a good way to avoid this/practice it with an easier object would be with birds with very skinny and tall legs. I really enjoyed drawing the storks and I started to layer them, because I wanted more space to be filled on my page. I think the minimal overlapping that I made adds more volume to the drawing.

For the watercolor, I decided to keep it simple like how the lines were pure contour and simple. Storks aren't very colorful aside from their legs and beaks, so I wanted to enhance and highlight those orangey-brown colors. For a background, I was a little stuck on what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do hyper-realistic scenery or any scenery for that matter because I thought it would take away from the simplicity of the straight lines and light watercolor. I ultimately decided on blobs of light blue watercolor that I then drew roses/zinnias/whatever type of flowers over. I thought that the blue would contrast well with the orange and the simple flower lines would tie right in with the whole image.