Okay, you’re right: this is NOT one of my photos or fractals. This is a line drawing that I wish I could credit to its rightful owner; please let me know if you know of the source? Thank you,
The reason for the switch in art today is that, as a student in John Kramar’s LVSonline introductory course on techniques for Remote Perception, the drawing was given as a subject with which to practice ‘blind drawing’. Blind drawing simply means that all of your attention is kept on the subject while, without looking at your paper, you draw its contours. For the exercise, the drawing was also turned upside down, so that one is truly just copying the shape and flow of the lines; a technique taught by Betty Edwards in her ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ courses and book.
Karol Grace posted about blind drawing in her Three Dog Studio post: Making Art with your Eyes Closed, just as the remote viewing class was introduced to it. In both uses, it is a warm-up for getting the figurative muscles of your art brain flexible and engaged. The results of blind contour drawing can be, um, disappointing and humbling, and , in friendly discussion, hilarious. I left a comment on the blog, saying something to the effect that her linework looked good even if the subject *was* a little (cue the friendly discussion *smile*) ‘randomized’ and she tossed down a grinning gauntlet, challenging me to nerve up and post my own stab at blind drawing; here we go-talk about ‘warts and all’ blog entries!
I attempted my first copy of the subject above, on the honor system, and found that I could not be trusted. Failed miserably; caught myself several times sneaking a peek at the drawing hand to try to place it for the next line. Predictably, the drawing was reasonably close to the original above. But, oh, the guilt! *grin*. I didn’t include that first drawing here, as the second of the truly blind attempts was made on the same paper and overlay it; very hard to tell which part was the peeked-at version and which was the second blind try in the resultant mess. To ensure that I couldn’t look at my drawing hand again, I went off and found a milk-jug box, the sort that holds two one-gallon plastic jugs of milk. It was just the right size to lie on its side on the desk, with room for a stack of paper and for pen maneuvering, inside. With my hand out of sight in the box, I tried it for the first time without being able to look. Horrible. Shudder-inducing. Really dreadful; you can find her right eye and eyelid floating in space next to the main..er…collision of lines. More Practice!
The third blind attempt a wasn’t a whole lot better. I have no recollection of drawing her nose three times, lol.
The final try has some recognizable copies of lines from the original, even if the misplaced right and left contours make it as much like the original face as a mask run over by an 18-wheeler. It is progress, however halting.
For me, blind drawing, in spite of the name, is a great way to practice seeing, seeing what is really in front of me, which I think is of great importance to how I make choices when I’m working with the camera. One of my most common errors is looking at, but not *seeing* the truth of the scene in the viewfinder. How is the light *really* distributed, how is the color from the thing closest to my center of interest altering the picture I think I’m taking, are my technical decisions with the camera and lens really setting the center of interest off from the colors and forms that might distract the eye. Having practice at seeing helps assure I don’t just find new ways to depict the proverbial lamppost growing-out-of-a-subject’s-head image.
I’m glad to have been re-introduced to this form of art exercise, it’s also a neat way to subtly shift my state of mind into something more focused and quieter. Not smarter, obviously, otherwise I’d’ve burned the evidence!
Well, that’s it, that’s my blind drawing come-uppance, lol. Let the friendly discussion begin!
Pssssst….on Karol’s Three Dog Studio blog there is also a very cool idea for making a sketching journal that is much less unnerving than a daily confrontation with a plain, blank page; check it out!
cheers,
pete
Pinging My Water Glass 
Pete,
I salute your courage!
Although I am intrigued by the hand in the milk box method of preventing unauthorized looking, I think the real issue is that the left brain was still in charge while you were sketching. It was telling you that your drawing had to look like your sample drawing, and because the left brain doesn’t like to be confused or slowed down in its analysis of what needs to be done, it was also telling you to hurry up and look, so it, the left brain, could copy the drawing in a more familiar way. It’s a challenge to keep that left brain from rattling you. You just have to keep on blind drawing to make lefty be quiet enough to allow the right brain to work.
It is a fascinating process.
Look at the personalities in the women you drew. Starting from your sample, a confidant, uncomplicated woman who looks like she enjoys a more traditional role, you progressed to the multi-tasking, modern woman who tries to do it all and is ready to bite the head off the next person she sees. The poor lady in the third example has lost her ability to cope. She looks frazzled and frightened by everything. Lady number four has gone over the edge. She is the personification of the three faces of Eve.
The longer I look, Lady #1 looks a great deal like Homer Simpson. I wonder if that cartoon is drawn via the blind contour method, or with the cartoonist’s hand in a milk bottle! 🙂
This all makes me want to do a blind contour drawing!
I am so excited to have my blog cited in yours. It makes me feel so authentic! I really don’t quite understand all this part of blogging yet. I mean, I understand it, I just don’t know how to do it.
Karol
I don’t recall hearing about ‘blind drawing’ before. You’ve inspired me to try it.
Hi James, that’s excellent! I’m glad you’re intrigued by the practice, it’s a great one for switching over to the more-or-less non-verbal side of looking at things. I like the practice of turning the subject upside down, so that it is unfamiliar to the rational mind. Once the rational mind pigeonholes an object it’s going to draw some preconceived notion; it’ll be harder to send it out of the room, so to speak. I find the same sort of problem, as I wrote, in the mind making assumptions about what I’m truly seeing in a viewfinder. Any practice that will make it easier to fall into the timeless place where you are really seeing, rather than looking, is a great help.
Have fun with it! If you have more willpower than I you won’t even need to find a box! 😀
Cheers!
pete
Hi Karol, thanks for the salute! Lol, dreadful, aren’t they? Fun, though, and a great exercise. I recommend the hand-in-box technique, I found I gave up trying to look much more quickly once the nosy hemisphere was convinced the view was blocked, the curtains drawn, nothing to see here. Granted, ya feel a little silly but that goes away with the left hemisphere going off in a corner to sulk while the right follows the curves.
Interesting that you should find a semblance of Homer Simpson somewhere in that rat’s nest of a first blind drawing; have a look at *just* the right contour line from the hair down on the last image. 😀 Which is odd, because I once watched about 4 minutes of the Simpson’s and gave up on the show in favor of online trivia games (where I constantly run into Simpson’s questions I can’t answer because I haven’t watched it, lol).
I don’t really understand the citing part of this either, and didn’t achieve a trackback to your blog (sorry about the excerpt, you can trim that out and just leave the URL if you wish, I think) until Anita told me she was getting a different URL for your page with the post to which I was trying to send folks. I just added the titling and it works. Weird.
Thanks for the challenge to put the exercises up, as hideous as they turned out to be; I thought it was fun.
Cheers,
pete
Hey Pete,
I really like the progress in each of them.
We have done that in my mental health group as a mindfulness exercise. Sometimes drawing the person across the table from us without looking at the paper. Or drawing our hand the same way and (ugh) sometimes with our non dominant hand…I hate that! lol
Unlike Karol, I think your third woman is amazing put together looking (compared to the first two)! I’m impressed at seeing the improvement. Wish I’d saved a few of mine now but no…I really don’t! 😉
Anita
Hi Anita! Thanks! :::::chanting::::Post! Post! Post!::: Hee, I wish you had saved some to post, maybe Karol can have started a whole new fearless approach to blogging, ‘The Out-Takes Blog Ring’, lol. We did a similar exercise, the hand one, a couple of decades ago as part of the therapeutic art lesson portion of one of my dad’s stints going to cancer patient classes. Hm. I really recommend turning the subject upside down, but I imagine if you did that with the person across the table from you there’d be…consequences.
As far as the way the drawings evolved, I fall somewhere between you and Karol, though I did wonder about how much negative emotion the misplaced lines did seem to show while I was scanning the drawings in. I was just happy that the two sides of the face were on opposite sides of the head. But she does definitely look like no-one to cross. I did feel good about the progress in recognizability, but I’m semi-sure it’s cheating to do the same thing over and over, even inside a box, lol.
Thanks for reading my looong blogblob and chiming in! Now, the *next* time you do a blind or non-dominant hand contour drawing… 😀
Cheers!
pete
Drawing the subject upside down is a new twist to me in this exercise. I can see the advantages, it helps remove another level of familiarity to the object as a whole when we turn it on its head! We can (maybe) let loose of some of our expectations and really focus on the lines.
I LOVE the idea of an Outtakes Blog ring! That is inspired.
Hi Bean! I’d forgotten the upside-down idea until my Remote Perception instructor had it in his lesson. It really does seem to make it easier to not get ‘trapped’ in preconceptions. Of course, it’d be best to be able to just live in right-brain mode, but it becomes hard to be on time to anything and to remember to eat…all manner of small, but important, little details just float away, lol.
The Outtakes Blog Ring just *sounds* like it should exist, although, it may be hard to sell the concept to anyone not submitting work…” here is the picture from yesterday…you can just see the blue and black tail-feathers of the jay as it hopped out of the frame,” or “And this is when I decided to try mixing the India ink with the water soluble glue to draw animation cels…as you can see, it only takes a small spill of coffee to create an abstract worthy of critical note.” *grin* I think that with a proper cautionary-tale approach, it could be a fun and educational read. Might even benefit from a monthly liar’s club theme where one defends a picture as intentional but misunderstood: “this is a shot of a Yeti at Yosemite, it may look like an ordinary out-of-focus shrub, but that’s merely a form of algae that grows in the fur at higher temperatures and lower altitudes in the Yeti’s range.” *grin* Well, maybe not.
Cheers, thanks for coming to see how the challenge came out!
pete
What an amusing dialogue…I start to warm to this Blog Thing, after a notably slow start. Thanks! Betsy
Hi Betsy! Hey, you’ll have to pedal backwards to catch up with me at slowness; this is still my Basic Blogging course, continued from the last LVS session. I only hope I don’t end up being able to paraphrase an old joke, “Ah yes, the 6-week Basic Blogging course…that was the happiest 5 years of my life,” *Grin*
I thoroughly enjoyed that blind drawing “challenge”, and the comments people had were interesting as well, getting into the linework and the strange way repetition evolved the shape. I still play with the oh…one-third serious idea of an Out-take Blog Ring, but haven’t thought of a good way to make that work.
I’m glad you enjoyed the Challenge, lol, thanks for reading and responding!
Cheers,
pete