Here’s a drawing exercise that’s poles apart from the quick and intuitive gesture studies, although as with gesture, the technique seems to be most widely applied in figurative work …… in reality, it’s as much fun for drawing anything!
The idea is to develop a drawing with a single line. A pure continuous contour approach develops a drawing with a single line, like running a thread over the contours that you see. One objective is to slow the drawing process, resulting in as much observed detail as possible. It’s primarily an exercise in observation – most of the time should be spent looking at the reference and only briefly glancing at the drawing paper. The result might look somewhat stilted and that does not matter: In fact, I prefer to do this exercise with my non-drawing hand (as above), 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!
Here’s more information and practice:
1. Check out this demonstration and here’s a good summary article.
2. Look across the room and create 5 contour drawings (pen or pencil), 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: 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.
3. Draw each of your hands from life using the same a continuous contour technique. Yes, this means you get to use your non-drawing hand! Take about 5 minutes for each one.
4. Finally, draw a quick gesture and then keep drawing, switching to contour style on the same drawing. Here, you’re combining the 2 techniques: quick gestural marks and slow and deliberate contours. I call this “drawing fast and slow” – fast so you intuitively react to the image and slow, so that you move into the careful observation zone. Two complementary aspects of drawing.
