ART 244

Blind Contour Drawing—Week 3 (04.28-05.04)

For my third week of blind contouring, I decided to change my theme into something that I found more challenging—fabric folds. Not only are fabric folds difficult to draw, but they’re time-consuming and pretty therapeutic in my opinion. Since I have a lot of dresses, I thought that using them as real-time references would work for most of my blind contouring pieces. This week, I only focused on the dresses and fabric folds themselves rather than drawing a model wearing the dress. I have some photos of me wearing certain dresses that I will use for next week, but at the same time, I think it’s also important that I use a model sitting in front of me so I can compare the differences and similarities.

I took a short timelapse video of my first blind contour drawing this week to record my typical drawing process. It was a little distracting though, and I ended up redoing the piece because I felt as if I didn’t focus enough on my reference, but I kept the footage anyway.

In the timelapse video, which I was having issues uploading here, I noticed that I initially started out with a fraction of the dress before my lines started straying all over the page. Although that’s how blind contouring works, of course, it was satisfying to see that I was on track for the first few minutes and nailed the correct position and placement. The second piece, however, isn’t my favorite. The fabric in the photo I used as reference was bunched up at the bottom, so the lines got confusing as I drew more. I also used a thick brush pen for these pieces since I said I wanted to incorporate variety into my lines. I didn’t really see that happening, though. I think this is because I was so focused on drawing that I held the nib in a certain angle for too long instead of following the flow the of the brush. I think I’ll try a different, thinner brush pen for the next one. I’m very curious as to how drawing a model wearing a dress would look like. I’ve never tried it before and I think it’ll be a nice upgrade from just the dress itself. I’d have to draw fabric folds and some human anatomy too, which is always exciting. I’ve drawn plenty of fabric in general, but it’s always a challenge to blindly contour it. I look forward to mixing up this theme again.