Drawing Without Looking at Paper Trains the Eye

Once we get beyond the early elementary years, drawing practice is very much about tricking our mind into shifting from a judgmental language-based mode into a more experimental image-based mode.

Many art class exercises aim to trick the brain into making this shift. One of my favorites is called blind contour drawing and has been popularized by Betty Edwards in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.  

Contour drawings are line drawings; the trick to blind contour drawings is that the lines are drawn without looking at the page - all attention is focused on the subject one is drawing.  

This always meets with surprise and silliness when I demonstrate to kids.  Drawing without looking at the paper! But look how messed up it looks!  With this part of the idea - by starting with a goal of making a "messed up" drawing, we are able to free ourselves to just explore lines as a way of making marks and describing edges.  

The other part of the exercise is knowing where the attention is focused. By not looking at the paper, we focus with much greater attention on the subject. When our eyes remain on the person or object we are drawing we do much more careful looking and attending to detail.  

The idea is that as the eyes move the pen or pencil tracks their movement on the page.  After some fun with the silliness and wonder of seeing a mixed-up drawing, artists look more carefully at their marks and begin to see that some of the lines do follow the contours or lines of the object seen. 

The next step is to preserve this habit of careful looking and begin to peek at the page so the drawings appear a bit less mixed-up. For partial blind contour drawing the attention is still on the subject 80 percent of the time, but the artist peeks down from time to time to move the pen and check that placement makes sense.  

Partial blind contour drawings have an energetic and gestural quality and yet they begin to look like the subject. They work well for portraits and quick sketches and often have a caricature-like quality when done of faces.  

Have some fun at home with blind contour drawings.  Introduce this silly and fun kind of drawing to your family and see what happens. Working in a group or in pairs adds to the fun because you can check each other to be sure no one cheats and looks at the paper.  

Working in series is also fun so a group of portraits of people, chairs, or shoes makes a fun exercise resulting in silly whimsical drawings and some improved observation skills.