Pure Contour and Pattern Drawing

Giovanni 29 October, 2018

This drawing is a pure contour drawing which means that someone looks at an object and studies all of the lines on that certain object. The person then draws the object, in this case the crabs and dinosaur, and keeps looking at it every couple seconds. This helps maintain a work in progress that looks like the object that is being drawn and is also drawn to scale. The crabs that I drew were profile and aerial views. The profile view is the one that views the side of the crab while the aerial view is the view from the top of the crab. My other pure contour drawing is the dinosaur which I used a frontal view on. This drawing called for a frontal and a profile view and one additional view. I used frontal view for my last view.

After drawing the pure contour objects, I had to fill i the negative space. Negative space is the space that is not occupied by the object (ex. the colored in portion of my drawing). I used different techniques to fill in the negative space, including: dots, stripes and fish scales. I also used a abstract rectangle pattern in the top right corner. To fill in the patterns I used colored pencils of different colors and made sure to burnish with my colored pencil, which means that I pressed hard enough that there was no white showing under the color. This makes the negative space have a nice contrast against the positive space.

There was one thing that I wish that I could've fixed when making this drawing. I wish that I did not pick objects that took up as much space, meaning that I would've had more negative space to play around with. I also would have done more with the patterns. The pattern in the top right corner of the drawing had too much space behind the rectangles (the pink space). I only realized this after I had already filled in the rest of the space with pink colored pencil. By then it was too late to fix. But I am still very happy with the result of my pure contour and pattern drawing. I love drawing and making up my own patterns and I hope that I will do more drawings that have to do with pattern in the future.