The April Sketchers challenge: Create a blind contour drawing without looking at the paper, canvas, or computer.  Use a photograph or live subject of a person, place or thing as your reference.  Don’t look down while drawing…that’s cheating!  Then turn your blind contour drawing into an abstract work of art using a medium of your choice.  Seven members took up the challenge, took pictures along the way and shared them at the reveal.



Bernie Russ - Bernie chose her entry hall table as her blind contour challenge. She shared these steps from initial to final drawing.

Joan Milligan - Inspired by Cheri’s overlapping birds, Joan decided to blindly draw the kittens she is fostering….the kitties were only a few weeks old! She dropped pale colors on the page, highlighted their ‘big eyes’ in blue and outlined the overlapping figures. Cute!

Susan Herrle - This was a fun challenge! At an EAA board meeting, Sue did a blind sketch of Rozenia in less than 2 minutes on the back of board notes. She later created a digital composite and also copied the line drawing onto card stock. Using the card stock images, she had fun quickly adding color. Definitely not frame quality, just fun to do. Sue decided to repeat the process using a picture that Joan shared of her little black kitty.

Rozenia Cunningham - Rozenia blindly sketch a funeral scene from a photo, using black ink and watercolor to create this ‘screenshot’ abstract

Ellen Howard - Ellen chose to blindly sketch a sewing machine attachment, which by itself could be considered an abstract sculpture. We decide it was a ‘ruffler’. Sketching it using a sharpie marker on watercolor paper, she added a triad of colors, orange, pink and blue. The result was a very unique abstract. Ellen had fun and was inspired to ‘get something done’.

Jeri Kluiber - Jeri likes to do contour drawings. Before the meeting she blindly sketched a statue from the Cleveland Art Museum, capturing the gesture between the head and neck. She also shared another contour drawing with us, not done blindly.