Today I discovered some fun while doing drawing exercises and experimentation.
I found an expressive way to draw portraits quick!
Blind contour drawing is not something new for me, but doing quick with expressive lines was a new discovery.
Ok, let me explain, the process of blind contour drawing is having your eyes lock on the subject while your hands do the rest of the drawing without lifting up the drawing tool.
During the drawing process, your eyes cannot look back to the paper and do the correction or judging if this is good or bad, here needs to be bigger or smaller, the proportion is wrong, the angle needs to move slightly and so on.
Here I used some examples using random portraits for testing the technique.
Supposedly, when doing the blind contour drawing, the artist draws slowly, steadily and carefully, because this is an exercise for training our brain, eyes and hand coordination.
I wanted to find out what happens if I do it quick without giving time for my brain to process the judgement and just let my hand draws faster than my brain thinking.
Because I felt a bit boring to draw slowly and carefully, I want to see the result asap, and surprisingly drawing with short, quick and broken lines, the result was quite stunning!
I used the portrait of John Singer Sargent as my model and below are my experimentation with my newly discovered technique.
Finally I used different pens to test my experimentation and found out different pens bring different results due to its thickness and ink opacity.
The good thing about this kind of drawing is that each drawing is different and unique, it is impossible to draw 2 or more copies exactly the same.
The expressive and floating lines bring the whole drawing to another level.
I have tried many different pens, but POSCA pens (Japanese brand) is still my loving drawing tool, its black is irreplaceable.