Blind Contour

The blind contour assignment started out as two blind contour drawings. Contour lines are clean, solid lines, so these drawings were composed of all contour lines at first. These were blind contour because I had to look at something and draw on a piece of paper that I wasn't looking at, hence the name "blind contour". I had to draw two things in these two drawings and those two things were a self portrait of myself and my hand.

The first drawing looks kind of like it was a blind person who drew it, so you could probably guess the first drawing was a blind contour drawing. I tried to make the first drawing look at least a little like me but that was a little tough when I couldn't see the paper so it ended up looking pretty strange but did at least look sort of like a face. What I did to make this drawing was I looked at a mirror and drew on a piece of paper next to me where I couldn't see it. I tried making the outline of my head first and then the details of my face inside. The first drawing was composed of just sharpie. How I started the second one was I looked at my hand and tried to draw my hand two or three times on a piece of paper blindly as well. After that, I was assigned to make one of the two pictures into something. I decided on the hand and made it into a landscape with two houses and an erupting volcano in the background. First I used a sharpie to alter my hands a bit to make them look more like houses. Next I filled in the houses, by burnishing a colored pencil. I realized there was a lot of empty space in the background so I drew an erupting volcano. After that I colored in the grass and the stone path and the volcano with colored pencil.

The reason I picked the hand to make into a landscape was that it had more lines and detail to work with. The main reason I picked it though was because I saw a house in the blind contour hand. If you look at it you can see that there is tan colored pencil around the houses. That is because I didn't really plan ahead and made the houses green, so I had to put tan colored pencil as dirt around the house because I didn't want the house to blend into the grass and wanted a contrasting color between the greens. I also thought the red looked good in contrast with the green in the majority of the drawing, so that is part of the reason I made a volcano. The other reason I made it was because I wanted to effectively use the empty space in the background with something interesting. The red of the volcano, in contrast with the lighter green, really draws your eyes to it so it is the focal point of the drawing.