Extended Blind Contour Drawing

The maroon marker on this drawing shows where the blind contour sketches are. The blind contour sketches look far from perfect, so I used a black marker to redraw the same sketch while looking at the paper. I redrew the 'more perfect' sketch to show how sometimes artists feel like their work has to be perfect. The 'perfect' sketches are the ones with the color. (The inside of the hand, and the outline of the other two.) The 'less perfect' sketches have the shades of gray, as if they aren't good enough. I outlined the contour drawing of the hand in all the colors to show that even with 'less perfect' drawings they can still be beautiful pieces of art, and the 'perfect' hand drawing is outlined in the grays to show that thinking everything needs to be perfect is a difficult way to work.

The blind contour sketches were originally done in pencil, but once I started coloring the rest of the piece with alcohol markers I realized that the pencil was too light. I had already used black as an outline for the 'perfect' sketches, so I used a maroon alcohol marker instead. This was all drawn on watercolor paper.

I was very confused when I started this project, so when I had all three blind contours sketched out, I randomly decided to trace my hand. I came up with the idea of comparing the blind contours to being perfect, so I made a black outline of a better sketch to go with each blind contour. I decided to use four shades of gray for the less perfect part, and five different colors for the perfect part.