Contour drawing for kids? This is what I’ve learned.

If you don’t know what contour drawing is it is the drawing or the lines, the contours of your subject.

To get people comfortable with the idea many art teachers start with what is called blind contour drawing.

This is an exercise to have the students look at the object the whole time as their pencil draws on the paper in front of them what they see without looking at what they are drawing.

Accuracy does not matter.

It is supposed to train your eyes to draw what you see.

These are my thoughts on contour drawing for kids especially blind contour drawing.

It doesn’t really work for young children. I’ve tried it a number of times.

I always have them start with the most readily available object which is their hand.

What I found was that it didn’t work. Plain and simple. Either they couldn’t stop themselves from looking at their paper or else they knew the object they were drawing and drew what they thought it should look like as opposed to really seeing it. Above is a fairly typical sample of what was done. 

When I asked them to try to put in details and try to get them to see more of what there is I get a little more detail.

I decided to move into just trying to copy an object.

I showed them this teapot (I put it in the middle of  the tables so they saw it from different angles) and told them to try drawing it.

I went over the contours with them and said they should just try it.

They drew on paper and the four results below is just a sampling but, most of the kids did a pretty good rendition of the teapot.(these were kids ages 6-8)

I then moved to a flat image. I chose something very easy with simple lines and told them to try to copy it

I put up a few pictures closer to where the kids were sitting so they could all get a good view of it.

Most of them got fairly good depictions of this duck even though I gave almost no instruction on how to do it.

This class was one that I did in my home but, as an art teacher I always had lots of reference images for the children to try and copy.

Some kids are naturally better at it than others but, I found that if I sat with them and broke down the parts of the image most kids could get a decent rendering.

Interestingly I always was against them tracing until recently. If a child want to copy a basic outline then you can have them trace it and THEN ask them to do it without tracing.

What happens is that the hand gets used to the contour line of the object and can then transfer that skill to a paper in a much more obvious manner.

In a video I watched recently of an art teacher (unfortunately Id don’t remember his name) he talked about contour line drawing. He taught to teach the children to move your eyes extremely slowly around the edges, contour lines of a subject and then have them slowly move their pencil around the paper as they did so.

This teaches kids to slow down and really SEE what the object is all about.

I’d love to hear your experience, if any. with doing contour drawing with kids.