![]() If you prefer not to draw but instead work in photography, consider taking a photograph and drawing cross contour lines on the photograph. See how just a few lines interrupting the white space give it a sense of form and volume? Cross Contour Challengeįor your challenge today, draw something round and something flat (an apple on a table, for example) with cross contours. Let’s go back to that apple at the beginning. So a cross contour can have a lot of different styles, but here’s why they’re fantastic in a drawing: they make a flat object look dimensional, and it doesn’t take a lot. Henry Moore, Elephant Scull Henry Moore, The Artist’s Hand IV Henry Moore Below are some cross contour drawings by Henry Moore, an artist known primarily for his sculptures. Sculptors have an inherent focus on space, mass, volume, and dimension. There are some fascinating cross contour drawings made by sculptors. So cross contours help a two dimensional rendering be more three dimensional, and sculptural. It still has light and shadow to describe the form, but without the descriptive information from the cross contour brush strokes, can you see how the portrait got more flat? painting altered in photoshop I took out the color (sorry) but I also took out the curves. Ray TurnerĬompare the painting above with the same painting I manipulated in photoshop. Painting this way adds a feeling of volume and mass to the form. When artists paint, they sometimes follow cross contours with their brush stroke, so each stroke adds information about value, color, and surface topography, all at the same time. See how the collection of lines make the face look 3D?Ĭross contours can be careful as in the Albrecht Durer, or mechanical, as in the Benjamin above, but cross contours are also present in dynamic loose gestures like this self portrait by Kathe Kollwitz. Here, they add shadow and tone for the face on our money to look less flat. Though they have nothing to do with shadow, making lines across a surface does make that surface look darker, so they most often appear as marks in shading, like in these pillows by Albrecht Durer. They do a lot for a drawing, and they’re interesting. It took me years to realize that I actually like cross contours. ![]() When I learned cross contour in school, we did projects like this apple below, and I wondered what the heck this had to do with anything, because I didn’t see any good drawings that were like this, and although it had that nifty 3D effect, I never wanted to draw like this again. Cross contours describe the form like outlines do, but they do it in the middle instead of at the edge. This is where cross contours become useful. ![]() Without a mark here and there to cue us in to what’s happening in the expanse of whiteness, the drawing remains flat. These outlines describe what the shapes do around the edges, but inside those edges, with the exception of those tiny hatches at the knuckles, there is only blank white, just as outside the boundaries, there is also only blank white, so we don’t really know what happens there. You can see how the lines describe the contours around the edges of the form, the defining edges of the facial features, and the outlines around the fingers. Below is an Egon Schiele drawing using contour lines. Contours describe the shape along the edges of a thing. “Contour” is the French word for outline, so contour lines are, quite simply, outlines. We are 1/3 done! Sunday is observational drawing day, so I’m sharing an exercise from school, with a twist. Today is the 10th day of our 30 Day Challenge.
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