Blind contour drawing is a method of drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

 widely used by art teachers, where an artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 draws the contour

Contour

Contour may refer to:* an outline or silhouette* a contour line on a contour map, or the corresponding line on the ground or sea bed* Contour , a phonetic sound* Pitch contour , a melody shape...

 of a subject without looking at the paper. The artistic technique was introduced by Kimon Nicolaïdes

Kimon Nicolaides

Kimon Nicolaїdes was an American art teacher, author and artist. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army in France as a camouflage artist.-Early life:...

 in The Natural Way to Draw, and further popularized by Betty Edwards

Betty Edwards

Betty Edwards is an American art teacher and author, best known for her 1979 book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. She taught and did research at the California State University, Long Beach until she retired in the late '90s...

as "pure contour drawing" in The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Technique

The student, fixes his or her eyes on the outline of the model or object, then tracks the edge of the object with his or her eyes, while simultaneously drawing the contour very slowly, in a steady, continuous line without lifting the pencil or looking at the paper.

Importance

Nicolaïdes and Edwards propose different ideas of why blind contour drawing is an important method of drawing for art students. Nicolaïdes instructs students to keep the belief that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. He suggested that the technique improves students' drawings since it causes students to use both senses of sight and touch. Edwards suggests that pure contour drawing creates a shift from left mode to right mode thinking. The left mode of the brain rejects meticulous, complex perception of spatial and relational information, consequently permitting the right brain to take over. Blind contour drawing may not produce a good drawing, however it helps students to draw more realistically, rather than relying on their memorized drawing symbols. Blind contour drawing trains the eye and hand to work as a team, and it helps students to see all of the details of the object.