Draw Tip Tuesday - Contour Portrait
Channel: Koosje Koene
Date: 2014-05-27

Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday!
Let's do a little bit of classic contour drawing.... doing a selfie!

copyrights koosjekoene.nl
Music by Contraband




Video Transcript

Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday

Today we're gonna use watercolor paper, a water resistant pen, I am using a uniball rollerball pen, and watercolors. This here is a clever little travel watercolor set from art-toolkit.com. It has magnets, so the watercolor pans snap right in there and you can snap colors out or in, whenever you want to change the palette that you'll have with you on-the-go. I love it!

Now, I've been doing a lot of self portraits lately. Daunting to do a self portrait? No! Not if you don't care about the outcome and simply enjoy the process. Let's do a bit of classic contour drawing: this means: follow the shapes and lines that you see with your pen, without lifting your pen from the paper. Another option is to not even look on the paper, but just keep looking at your subject, which is you, in this case. Just position yourself in front of the mirror, or snap a picture of yourself to work from. Doing this exercise with a friend can be a lot of fun to: sit opposite to each other and draw, following all the lines and shapes in the face you're looking at. You will probably end up with a mouth that crosses the eyes, or some other funny shift, because you haven't been looking at the paper.

What I'm king here though, is not lifting my pen, following the shapes and lines that I see, and checking my paper if I am going the right way... ish

Whoops! I forgot to add a bit of shoulder... so I did lift my pen after all. Well, because I hadn't been lifting my pen all that time before , my expression is kind of severe, but hey I AM enjoying this processs and look at all the lines in the hair, I really like what's happening here.

By adding a dash of watercolor, I will make the portrait a bit more alive. I make sure to keep it loose, and not make it a neatly filled coloring page, because I feel that's just not a fitting style. 

I've made myself look like an old lady, haha! But who cares? Ah well, it's my birthday next week so I better wake up and smell the coffee, this is probably what I'll be looking like in a while anyway!

Now that it's Tuesday, I'd say it's time to draw for you as well. Why don't you try one yourself? I speeded this video up, but really it took me only 10 minutes altogether.

Have fun.
And if you can't get enough, it's not to late to join my online workshop Awesome Art Journaling! Find out more on my website koosjekoene.nl
Maybe I'll see you in class!