A small group of Artful Quilters are working through the Color and Composition book by Katie Pasquini Masopaust and Brett Barker. We will be posting our work on our blogs for all to see. Here is our first assignment: Contour drawing.

Compose a still life.

Exercise one: Blind Contour Drawing

Set a timer for 25 minutes. Draw the contours of the still life without looking at your paper (hold a paper over your hand and pencil). It was hard for me to spend 25 minutes on this. Maybe my still life didn’t have enough contour complexity!!

Exercise two: Semi-blind contour drawing. Repeat the process. This time you can look at the paper at the beginning of a contour, then take your eyes off the paper and look at the object (75% looking at still life, 25% looking at the drawing).

Exercise three: Contour drawing. Draw the same still life. You can look at the paper as often as you like. but keep in mind that the more you look at the paper and not the still life – you are using that pesky left brain!!

I really enjoyed doing this. I think I need to sign up for a drawing class because this was fun. I am a very right-brained person so I think it was relatively easy for me to let go and let my hand and the pencil do the work.

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