Drawing with your other hand! – 4 November 2024
When you work slowly, very, very slowly, something interesting happens. Our day-to-day brain gets bored sits down and tunes out. Our natural subconscious intrigue with visual space plays with shapes, and “making something from nothing” starts to blossom.
All of this and more is given free play and we get into the “zone”. Time passes unnoticed; in a very real sense, we are in another world. In a world where time stands still and images appear before our eyes, complex arbitrary problems are solved in a joyful flow of process and investigation. For a while, that’s more important as the clock on the wall and the messages waiting on our phone.
Contour drawing involves developing a drawing with a single line, unravelling like a piece of thread. The line becomes primary and the work more abstract, filled with unbidden feeling manifest – a certain strangeness making its way into the brew.
The technique seems to be most widely applied in figurative work….in reality, it’s as much fun for drawing anything! A pure continuous contour approach develops a drawing running that “thread” of line over the contours that you see. One objective is to slow the drawing process, resulting in as much observed detail as possible.
Using your other hand feels strange and uncomfortable and perhaps herein lies it’s value. The other hand breaks the learned routines between eye, brain and hand and forces a slower, more observed approach. Using the other hand reduces expectations and this allows creativity to roam.
Look across the room and create 5 contour drawings (pen or pencil), by just drawing anything that you see, for 5 minutes apiece. Start anywhere on the subject and don’t lift your hand from the paper. When you feel your hand speeding up, make a conscious effort to slow down, that’s were the details lie.
When you come to a dead end, backtrack along the line-path: what I sometimes do is ease pressure and deliberately move to another spot on the paper, often trailing a ghosted line as I go, just to be as deliberate as possible.
This is primarily an exercise in observation – most of the time should be spent looking at the reference, only briefly glancing at the drawing paper. The results might look somewhat stilted and that does not matter: In fact, I prefer to do this with my non-drawing hand, just to make sure I really concentrate on the path of my line and understandably, this helps me go as slowly as I can. The more you look, the more you see – all those little details to fascinate!
Quite a few artists find these results more delightful than with their more customary hand. Sometimes more accurate, always more interesting. There’s that X factor at play coming from another place in your being.
