Blind Drawing

In this lesson, we tried out a technique sometimes used by graphic designers called ‘Blind Drawing’. The aim of this task was to look at a musical instrument that we had in front of us and drawing it without looking down at the paper. Drawing like this felt very odd and slightly frustrating because you kept feeling like you should be looking at your page. We were also told that it might be a good idea to keep you pen pressed down on the paper until we’d finished the drawing because it’d be very difficult to estimate where about you took the pen off the paper without looking. Overall, my drawings looked like they had clearly been drawn blind and you can roughly tell what they are…maybe.

The pens we used were the fine liners again. It’s a very traditional way of drawing and the pen ink goes onto the paper wet and dries after a few seconds. The advantage to these pens are that you can get very crisp lines; not that we’d need, or be able to draw crisp lines in this exercise anyway. The limitations are that the pen ink is fairly slow to dry and therefore you might accidentally slip and smudge the ink. Remarkably, this was about the only thing I didn’t do wrong whilst drawing blindly. The feelings of this drawing to me personally are confusing and frustrating. It’s strange to look at a drawing I’ve done that looks so unfinished and childish. But of course, the aim of the task was to give it a go and see what happened. The biggest difficulty I dealt with whilst drawing the instruments was trying not to look at the paper. It’s only natural that you look down at the piece of paper you’re drawing on and it was very hard to not. I did, however, manage the whole thing without peeking which made it all the funnier when I looked at the end. Not much worked about this task. The guitar drawing looks recognisable as a guitar which is a good thing but the trombone does not look anything like the instrument itself.

If I were to re-do this task again, I would focus more on where about the pen is on the paper and try not to lift it off at any point during the drawing. This way, you might end up with a better representable drawing at the end.