Roger Conlon
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  • Teaching - drawing
    • Drawing advice & quotes
    • Learning from masterpieces
    • Learn to Draw exercise sequence >
      • 1 Touch self portrait
      • 2 Feeling the form
      • 3 Wrapping the form
      • 4 Creating volumes with contours
      • 5 Contour systems - bracelet shading
      • 6 Tracing v copying
      • 7 Follow a leader
      • 8 Oval and Axis - constructing the figure
      • 9 Pattern : mapping and negative shapes
      • 10 Measured drawing
      • 11 Dark and light - tonal patterns
    • Drawing the Head >
      • Rotating basic form
      • Child's head demo
  • Teaching - painting
    • Painting advice & quotes
    • Oil Paint >
      • Materials to start
      • Colour mixing : hue, tone, intensity
      • Limited palette tonal painting
      • Oil glazes
Wrapping the form
Contours in the kitchen

1    Pick some objects from the kitchen – especially things you have handled and used.

2    With a fluid a movement as possible follow the surface of what you are drawing. As with the ‘feeling the form’  drawings and the blind contour drawings don’t get distracted by colour or light and dark.

3    Extend your marks as if you are wrapping what you are looking at with string – the string of your line.

4    Move your line around and along the three dimensions of the object.

Imagine wrapping up the object  as if it was a parcel. These lines, as they curve across the volumes, help to bring the objects out of the page. This  technique will  introduce some of the basic forms or three dimensional shapes that act as the building blocks of drawing such as cubes, cones, spheres and cylinders. A cup or rolling pin can be your cylinder , an orange a sphere, a funnel a cone etc.

Try varying the pressure of your line - perhaps darker and heavier lines as the form comes towards you  and lighter away from you or vice versa.
Try to look more at the object and less at the paper as you draw, continuing the practice of  imagining you are touching the object.