We’re just wrapping up the Feeling Edges lesson as part of the Group Run-through of my Foundations course… and as always I’ve gotten so much out of it.

Over the last week or so I’ve been doing regular continuous line drawings and thinking more about the following ideas:

• The power of working on your eye-hand coordination – can not be underemphasized!
• It’s really interesting to analyse your blind contour drawings to understand natural tendencies for inaccuracies with angles and lengths
• Scenes with overlapping shapes and interesting patterns of lines make the best subjects for contour drawings – regardless of how boring they are. Note: I’ve been sketching a really ugly local scene lately and have been really enjoying the challenge!
• The best place to start is the focal point and then work outwards.
• Not drawing everything in the scene (keeping some shapes open) creates the more interesting continuous line drawings.
• Doing this type of open-ended drawing is a great way to experiment with composition.
• The scale of your drawing and the thickness of your pen has a big impact on the result. There is no definitive formula as it depends on the subject matter but I’ve been experimenting a lot drawing at different scales and using different line thicknesses and now have a few preferences.
• Blind contour portraits during zoom calls are so much fun and a really easy way to record the sessions.
• Adding details/texture can morph a simple line drawing so that it resembles a cross-hatched one. I want to explore this idea more and also experiment with areas of black as well.

Here is the collection of my recent continuous line sketches…

Hmm… so many new ideas floating around in my head as a result of revisiting the most basic sketching skill.

BTW if you have purchased Foundations at any time you can watch the replay of last night’s livestream when I discussed these topics and more. Simply go to the Foundations classroom and look for the Lesson 2 Livestream Replays section (part 2.13)