TRANSPARENT CONTOUR DRAWING

Certainly one of the most powerful tools with which to see is the contour drawing. I guess that is why authors such as Nicolaides in his The Natural Way To Draw essentially starts his iconic tome with contour drawing.  See page 5.

To make a contour drawing, you move your eye slowly along the features of the object. And as you move your eye, you move your pencil on the paper in one continuous line without looking at the paper. When your eye moves, your pencil moves.  This teaches the very important precept of hand eye coordination, which all drawing books preach.  If the basic concept of contour drawing is unclear, please do a quick search with that term and you will get quickly oriented.

As we expect, Nicolaides teaches representational contour drawing. So even though you are drawing to see, you are sill expected to treat the forms as opaque.

I have always felt my mind expand when I make a contour drawing. There is a magical power that occurs when you do not look at the paper; the drawing becomes revelatory exactly because it is not representational.

Since I seem to have this penchant for putting the word transparent in front of everything (after all, the last post was titled Transparent Weaving), what would happen if we introduce a new drawing mode titled Transparent Contour Drawing?

Yes, you heard it hear first, folks.

I tested this theory by making these transparent contour drawings. All of them adhere to the principals taught by Nicolaides. All of them are one continuous line. I tried my best not to look down as I made my drawings; that can be difficult.  Nicolaides preaches that you absolutely must not look down.  But if you do, eh,  it is not the end of the world.

The Transparent Contour Drawing offers a subtle offsetting of the relationships of the elements. Yet with the transparency, you must complete the enclosure with a single continuous line. So the transparency amplifies the power of the contour drawing. There is a sense of risk and discovery.

It just seems amazing to me that Nicolaides, for example, did not make what seems to be the natural jump to transparency. All of the contour examples in his book are representational. It almost seems to me that a contour drawing demands to be transparent. Since you can’t pick up your pencil, then you should draw thru the forms, rather than the nearly irrelevant precept of maintaining representationality when you did not set out to make a representational drawing in the first place.

Like I said, the drawings on this page are the first transparent contour drawings that I have done. Crude as they are, I will continue to explore this concept in further drawings.  I think the potential of this approach is limitless.  And if anybody happens to be intrigued with this new way to draw, by all means let me know how it goes and what you learn from the application of this tool.