Jane’s Christmas present to me was to let me sign up for a three session art course this term – Observation to Abstraction with Ella Clocksin, who led the Oxford Summer School course I attended last summer. Today was session one and, in the morning, it was lots of blind drawing, like this:

In the afternoon (picture to follow once I’ve figured how to scan or photograph it) we got the paints out and tried a monochrome piece from memory, a directly painted piece and, my favourite, a blind painting – splashing colour and line around without looking at the paper.

I have been doing a fair amount of blind – or contour – drawing recently; you follow the edges of what you see with your eyes while echoing the moves with your drawing implement and thus not looking or editing your line while it plays out. However, it was good to try a few exercises to stretch that further including using the non-dominant hand and, in the picture above, using a Sharpie marker which produced a much longer line for me in the time exercise as I followed Dogwood stems up and down (look for the downward pointing triangles which are the main visual clue to what I was looking at).