I think a lot of people come to contour drawing in Betty Edwards’ classic book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but I actually prefer the way Kimon Nicolaïdes writes about it in his 1941 book, The Natural Way to Draw.

And go read Boom Town while you’re at it.) (You can see Sam’s drawings on his Instagram. It forces us to study the world as it actually is. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice - a gateway to pure being. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. Our brains are designed to simplify - to reduce the tumult of the world into order. The goal of blind drawing is to really see the thing you’re looking at, to almost spiritually merge with it, rather than retreat into your mental image of it.

It’s the fastest way to break them out of old bad habits, to make them unlearn lifeless conventions. He later discovered that blind contour drawing is an old art school exercise:įreshmen at art school are forced to draw blindly for hours. “For the first time in my adult life, I was genuinely surprised by something I had drawn.” Then an artist friend suggested to him he draw without looking at the page. (I’m thinking of Brian Eno’s control surrender diagram that he likes to draw.) You can’t control your way out of control.” He wrote of his frustrations with trying to draw in his adult life: “The problem, fundamentally, was one of control - I had too much of it, over too tiny a territory, and I wasn’t willing to surrender it. Sam Anderson, one of my favorite writers, wrote a wonderful Letter of Recommendation for blind contour drawing five years ago in the New York Times. My friend Jason Polan used to do a lot of his Every Person in New York drawings this way. My friend Wendy MacNaughton assigns these drawings in her workshops. If you look at the images in order, it looks like my face is re-arranging itself. For the past week, I’ve been making a blind contour self-portrait - drawing without looking at the page - each morning to warm up my diary.

Easy contour drawing you tube