Contour line drawings are drawings that show form using lines. These drawings try to show three dimensional shapes without using shading and generally have the outline of shapes drawn with one defined line.
This video shows example of drawing contour lines.
This video shows continuous contour line drawing, a technique I used during this class exercise.
Andy Warhol is an artist, filmmaker, and print maker who we studied during class. We looked at various Warhol sketches to serve as inspiration for our contour line drawings. I have included a few of my favorite drawings of Warhol below:
Click here to go to Andy Warhol's website.
For our class assignment with contour drawings, we had various objects that we were tasked to draw. In all we had to draw 25 of the objects.
The first group of objects I drew were to warm up and get into the groove of doing contour. I drew them how I would normally draw anything else
The rest of the contour drawings I decided to do with my left hand to see how that would impact the designs and make them more interesting. I am right-handed and pretty far from ambidextrous. I think that some of the drawings came out much better than I expected and I can say I actually like how the drawings came out. The forms of each of the shapes are all really interesting and dynamic.
After looking at some of the designs, they reminded me of a tattoo I have, which is an outline of a shark. I wanted to see what some of these designs would look like as tattoos so I used Photoshop to put some of my contours onto statues as tattoos.
