Extended Blind Contour Drawing

To create my piece Heads will Roll, I first did blind contour drawings of my hands and face using a Sharpie brand permanent marker. After I had completed these drawings I was stuck, I was unsure of what to do, so I spun the drawing repeatedly around on the desktop until I could come up with a plan of action. Eventually I saw two parallel images, heads rolling off groups of hands divided by another group of hands, though I wasn’t thrilled with this idea I decided this would be the best way to go, considering the time constraints. From there I broke out the water colors, trying to make the line of hands that divided the page as bright and bombastic as I could. I didn’t want to create gore in this piece, so chose to use purples and blues in addition to reds to create ‘auras’ around the heads. At one point, when I was cleaning the red color tab in the paint set, I got a large amount of paint on a paper towel, this I decided to use to create more of a texture in the ‘aura’ of the more realistic head.

In this assignment we were tasked with trying to create balance and unity within the piece, as the blind contours were wild and unorganized across the page. To try to combat that I used a similar color palate around the heads and made purple lines dripping from a majority of the uncolored hands. I was lucky enough to have the heads evenly spaced from the edges of the paper, so it seems as though the upper head is going to bounce into the position of the lower head, thus creating movement.

This is piece, though it’s title may suggest it, really isn’t gory at all, instead Heads will Roll refers to a reality that with anger comes consequences and that revenge has its own ripple effect. This piece shows two near identical instances, perhaps happening in parallel universes, that are both the result of the other, one head is set in motion and so too is the other.