As promised here is a more detailed blog on some of the activities that were done during AESA's Beginners Drawing Workshop.  The workshop began with an exploration of blind contour drawing.  Blind contour is a method of drawing that involves drawing the contour of your subject while not looking at your paper.  For the workshop each participant found a partner and had 5 minutes to draw their partner's face.  The key to blind contour drawing is to draw one continous line in a slow and steady manner without lifting your pencil from the paper.  While the drawings produced may seem more akin to scribbles, blind contour drawing does help students to draw more realistically, since it trains students to focus on all the details of their subject.  I have also found that blind contour drawings are full of character, can be a good classroom icebreaker, and can ease students' anxiety of not being able to draw realistically.

Below are a few examples of blind contour drawings - including the one I did at the AESA workshop.





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