Contour Line Drawing

Methods of Teaching Contour Drawing:

 Teaching your students to draw contour line drawings is a great way to help improve their observational skills and prepare them for more advance drawing technics. It helps the student to learn to draw the lines they see that make up the object and not the symbol that represents of the object they see (that we have been trained represents the object our how life). 



LT: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Igor  RT: Pencil Drawing

1.Drawing Upside Down
    One method for teaching contour drawing skills is by having students draw pictures upside down.  This helps the mind to stop seeing objects as they are and braking them down into basic lines. 

   

2.   Blind Contour Drawing
   Another method is blind contour drawing on newsprint paper.  You will use your hand to draw from.


Blind Contour Drawing of hand

         Hint: One simplified method of explaining this to a student who is having a hard time understanding the concept would be the “pet ant” approach.  You have an invisible pet ant on a leash and you place that ant on your hand. (Don’t forget to name him).  You follow him with your eyes everywhere he goes.  If you take your eyes of him you will loss him.  Your other hand follows his path on the paper.  The tip of the marker is stuck to the paper and cannot be lifted. Do about 10 of these drawings.

 

3. Contour Line Drawing
In contour line drawing  students can glance at their paper from time to time. Start with hand drawings again, about 10.  Students can progress to contour drawing of their legs or shoes.  Then still life objects.

Hand Contour Line Drawing

Typewriter Contour Line Drawing

4. Final Project
For a final project have the students overlap several Contour drawings of the same or similar objects (in different directions) then go into the individual shapes and add patterns, textures, and repetition. This will create a fun, unique and creative piece of artwork that is only limited by your imagination.

Example:

Advise For 1st Day of Teaching

Thoughts on Teaching

The overall purpose of this blog is record my lesson plans, pictures of example artwork, and experience I have during my Practicum.  In my first entry I am going to give advice (to myself) for the first day of teaching middle and high school students. I have had a lot of past experience working with Elementry student, but I have only worked with high school students once.  I am not really sure what advice to give myself.  The one experience I had was positive.  The students were each very different and each student had very different levels and types of artist abilities. 

Have a lot of patience. Lesson very carefully to what they say.  I think a lot of them lack confidence in their artwork and sometimes this makes this afraid to try new things. They can become very defensive if they feel like they are failing themselves and sometimes even you.  I tell them the truth that I’m not good at every type of art, but I do try different types. It’s like exploration, you never know what you’ll discovery about yourself and be able to use in your artwork in the future. If you don’t try, you definitely will never know.

Getting to know their names is going to be a challenge for me.  I have hard time with names.  I can tell you everything we talked about, but I have never been able to remember names. I usually takes me a good month and names are very important to high school students.  So I will have to work extra hard on this. I will also need to make sure my lesson are challenging for the age level.  I need to make sure the students are interested in the subject matter and actively engaged. 

I think that over all I will be just fine, but will learn a lot for the hands on experience.