My blind contour drawing project I began in February hit 100 drawings, so I made a zine out of them. (You can see them all in higher resolution on Instagram.) My friend Wendy MacNaughton has a blind drawing exercise in this weekend’s NYTimes: “How to See, in Four Minutes.”
The text of this zine is cut out of the book How to Entertain With Your Pocket Calculator.
After I posted it yesterday, a few readers mentioned that it reminded them of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:
Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
The original French hung on a sign in Fred Rogers’ office: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
When I was making the zine, I was singing Kate Bush:
I found a book on how to be invisible
Take a pinch of keyhole
And fold yourself up
You cut along a dotted line
You think inside out
And you’re invisible
Filed under: zines
Here are four self-portraits I drew today, in the order I drew them.
The first was a blind contour like I’ve been drawing every day since Valentine’s Day. The second was done completely blind — from memory, not looking at the paper or a mirror. The third was done from memory while looking at my paper. The fourth was done while looking in the mirror and looking at the paper.
Taken together, they suggest to me that my latest blind drawings rely more on muscle memory than actual looking. Probably time to move on to another subject. Or draw myself upside down or something.
A friend on Twitter said they reminded him of these self-portraits done after taking different drugs. (Probably inspired by this famous series done during an LSD trip.) The way my face shifts and morphs over time makes me think more of these terrifying and sad self portraits by William Utermohlen “as he slowly deteriorated under the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.”
A final thought: like with all images and words, the meaning of these drawings shifts based on the words I put underneath them. It’s worth pausing to think about what these images would or wouldn’t have said, if anything, without words underneath them…
I know lots of parents are stuck at home with kiddos right now, so I thought I’d put together a big list of my favorite resources for drawing with kids. (If you’re stuck creatively, by the way, nothing helps like drawing with a 4-year-old.) I’ll start with instructional books and videos, and move on to supplies.
My all-time favorite drawing book is Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World, which takes a collage-like approach to drawing:
Here’s a sample of one of the spreads:
If they like Make A World, there’s a ton of other Emberley books for them to get into.
And here is a short documentary for kids to get to know the wonderful man behind the books.
Think of Super Simple Draw as a kind of animated version of Ed Emberley’s books. My kids love to sit side-by-side and follow the directions. There’s a couple seasons on Amazon Prime, but there’s also a ton of videos on YouTube.
Here’s their video for how to draw a robot:
And here are some drawings from when Owen was 5 and Jules was 3:
Nobody has taught me more about the magic of drawing than the queen, Ms. Lynda Barry. Her latest book, Making Comics, is filled with exercises perfect for kids of all ages, but I love everything she’s done. Most recently, she’s posted some draw along videos to her YouTube channel.
Here’s a video of Lynda talking about how anyone can draw:
Here’s how to draw a chicken:
And here’s Lynda drawing a cat, a turtle, and a dog.
I love Willems’s books and these Lunch Doodles not only provide a drawing lesson, Willems also shows off his studio and talks about the process of making the books. (They’re all archived on Youtube.)
Other great illustrators who are sharing lessons on their Instagrams: @wendymac, @carsonellis, and @mikelowerystudio.
Art supplies are some of the best gifts you can give kids, but so many art supplies made for kids are straight-up junk. Here’s some stuff my my boys love that isn’t terribly expensive:
Regular crayons are cheap and they don’t make a mess, but they’re hard to hold in tiny hands and kids have to really press hard with them to get any kind of decent result.
These Slick Stix are easy to grip and they lay down a really silky smooth line.
Give some of these to your kids along with some big pieces of paper and pretty soon you’ll have a bunch of Jean-Michel Basquiats to hang around the house.
This tip comes from my wife:
If your kid has a favorite color of marker, instead of buying another 8-color pack from Target or wherever, go online and buy a box of a single color in bulk.
(Our youngest goes through a ton of black.)
My youngest son had trouble making circles early on, so he loved to use these for wheels on cars, faces, etc.
They’re a little expensive, but they last a long time. (Try the exercises in Ed Emberley’s Funprint Drawing Book or copying pages from Little Blue and Little Yellow).
If you print them on top of each other, they mix color, so you can do a little Toddler Color Theory.
If you have a sidewalk, a driveway, or a concrete porch (see above) give them some sidewalk chalk and kick their butts outside.
Worry less about the quality and more about the quantity. We just go to Costco and buy whatever gigantic boxes of cheap copy paper they have and let the kids use as much as they want. (People would probably be shocked if they knew how much paper our 4-year-old goes through. But it’s worth it.) My friend buys paper for next-to-nothing in thrift and re-use stores.
Happy drawing!
After doing a lot of blind contour drawings I’ve started noticing when I make false lines — lines that seem like they should be there, but aren’t based on actual looking.
This happened last night when I was watching a William Kentridge documentary and found myself filling in features on his face after the screen switched from a shot of him talking.
It’s not about a line not looking right, exactly, a false line does not feel right when you make it.
Once you train yourself to notice false lines and that icky feeling you get from making them, you push yourself to go back to looking harder.
There must be a correlation here with writing. We use the same term — “lines” — to describe units of words across the page.
How do we know when we’ve written a false line?
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