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During the first week of life drawing one we were given shells with which we will be studying all semester. The first exercise we did were blind contour drawings of the shells. I liked how we were instructed to lay a sheet of paper over our drawings, in order to put the “blind” in “blind contour”. I feel that the sheet of paper forced us to think a lot more about each and every aspect of every line we drew. And once we made a few lines we had to judge the distance between where our charcoal was and where we (thought that) we wanted it to be. It is very tempting to look at your lines without the cover sheet, and I appreciated the thoughtfulness that was required. I believe that it produced much more interesting drawings.

            Another thing that I hadn’t ever done was hold the object that I was drawing (in this case a shell) in my hand. It is very helpful in visualizing what happens to the lines after they disappear off of the composition. Being able to see where these lines go allows you to observe the curves and understand why the surface moves in the way that it does.

            The second thing we did that day was make single line contour drawings, by using a single line to show the shape of an object (again a shell). This exercise made me think about mark making and line weight. Although my drawing didn’t really appear to be one line (and it was probably about five lines) I did keep my charcoal on the paper the majority of the time. I like the way that my drawing turned out… but it could have been a whole lot better…