Mixed Media Contour Design 

The point of blind contour is to look at your subject and not your paper so that you really get an honest hand eye coordination representation. They often do not look much like the subject at all,a nd instead look like a mixed up jumble of lines that barely represent the subject. Maybe you can make out the eyes, or the nose, but the lips are above the nose; the proportions are usually very wrong. Then we had to glue them onto a background and make them look like a finished piece, not just a bunch of little pieces glued onto a random background. I wanted to use color and shading and slowly fade my pieces into the background. 

I didn't use graphite pencil at all in this piece because I never sketched anything. I started right away using pen to make my blind contours. Then I went bcak in with the pen to make them darker, and the lines more defined. For my first attempt at the background I used oil pastel. For my second attempt, I used watercolors and salt, then for the last version I just used watercolor. Then I used a glue stick to glue the contour drawings I had cut out with scissors onto my background. I then used pen and colored pencil to blend the cut outs and the background together. 

I strated with the blind contours which I simply used real people and objects to make them. I then started on my background; I planned to make an oil pastel drawing that was a rough shade which I would then use a heat gun to melt the pastel into itslef to make almost a drippy effect, but that didn't go as planned. I drew out my pastel drawing which is seen in image two, then I used the hairdryer, and it just sort of burnt it so it's hardened amd didn't drip in the slightest so i decided to start over. I wanted to try out this watercolor and salt thing, so I did a watercolor painting then added salt on top of it and then more water to make the slaf effect more dramaticized. It didn't work as well as I wanted, the salt didn't completely come off so the paper was a rough texture that I wasn't sure glue would stick to, or colored pencil would look good over, and I also left it at home the day it was due, so I started over, yet again.  This time I just did a simple watercolor gradient which I glued my pieces onto. I had no idea what I wanted to do at all to make things blend in, so i looked up some things, and most of them had shaded in their contours, so I decided to do that, then make the shading extend further than the contours to blend them with the background.