The Benefits of Practicing a Continuous Line Drawing!

So what is a continuous line drawing? Well, is is a drawing where you will focus on a contour line of a subject by not let the pencil leave the drawing pad once you start!

Depending on what type of drawing you are trying to do, it will contain both elements of contour and gesture drawings.

The whole purpose of doing these types of drawings is that it allows you to look at every little bit of detail as you work through your composition.

In other words, it is suppose to improve your observation skills regarding your subject! Sometimes it can come from memory or from an actual live subject.

It can be organic or inorganic as well. The only difference is what type of lines and techniques you will need to come up with to create continuous line drawings of your subject.

1. The process

Despite the seemingly innocent look of these drawings, there is a process that will help you start your sketch.

In any subject or composition, your best bet is to work from the outside all the way to the inside. That means you need to start creating an outline of your subject before you start looking at the details.

Two examples that come to mind are an old children's puzzle and a spiraling circle.

On the puzzle, the object is to create a simple 'house' where you cannot draw over an existing line.

While there are a number of ways to solve the puzzle, the most intuitive method is to complete the entire outside perimeter before you work on the inside.

It is the same with the spiraling circle. You start from the outside and spiral inside. Of course, you can start from the middle and work outwards in either example.

However, the main lesson here is to let you look at things in broad terms and move towards the specific.

With the spiral example, you can control where the center of the point ends up while you cannot do that if you started from the center.

With the house example, you have to plan ahead to see how big you want your house to be instead of knowing just how much space it can take up on your composition.

It is always easier to see the entire subject for what it is than to create a subject from specific parts! That is one important observation skill that a continuous line drawing can help with.

2. Simple inorganic drawings

The challenge of inorganic, manmade objects is that there are a lot of angles you can play with.

For some, this may be harder than it looks. Not only are you doing the entire composition in one go, you need to plan ahead on how you want to accomplish it.

This is because you need to think of a method to handle angles since, unlike regular curved lines, angles are not very natural in terms of drawing.

You have to draw a line, stop at a pivot point, and continue the line in a different direction.

Your desktop is a perfect example as it contains a lot of products having sharp angles.

All this really does train you to look at the entire composition in your head as you figure out how each angle will connect to one another.

As mentioned, the easiest way is to start from the outline of your subject and move into the inner details.

It is ok to pause from time to time as you readjust where your next angle or line should be. As long as you are actively thinking about the entire composition, then you are learning!

3. Organic drawings

Continuous line drawings with organic subjects are more natural as there are very little angles to deal with.

While everything can be done using curves, the challenge here is to distinguish one curved line from another as it all meshes together.

Not only that, you need to decide where to put the curves, as that would create unnecessary textures and outlines not originally planned.

As normal, start from the outside and work your way inwards. Focus on what is in the composition. In this case, there will be two large bulges for the head and the flower.

The face can be a challenge on its own. Too many curved lines will give the appearance of wrinkles when you are trying to go for a younger look.

With your observation skills, what types of curves do you see and how would you connect these curves? How would you juxtapose the curves with one subject to another?

As you can see, it can get pretty difficult at times. What you can do to make it easier for yourself is to retrace existing lines.

When you do that, you are bolding the outline of the subject as well as giving yourself another starting area for your curve to work on other details.

The ability to see objects from one another is an import skill needed for digital drawing and digital painting. Hopefully, an organic continuous line drawing this should teach you just that.

4. Artistic benefits

Aside from improving your observation skills, acontinuous line drawing have another added benefit in that it helps you find a composition!

In order for that to happen, there needs to be a sense of randomness to your composition. That is, you're not drawing a physical subject or scenery.

Instead, you are creating patterns that do not particularly make sense as you feel your way through your drawing.

The ability to construct a composition is essential for digital painting and digital drawing. From just one random continuous line drawing, you can potentially make 100s of different compositions.

See if you can pick out a few compositions from your scribbles. Think about a subject and where it will fit inside the random pattern.

For example, any weird oval openings in your scribble can become a dungeon opening. Any weird angled lines can become a sky bridge in futuristic city.

In your digital drawing software, you can even stack multiple line drawings on top of each other. When you do that, manipulating and moving different line drawings can yield even more potential compositions.

It is all up to your imagination to pick up a composition from the continuous line drawing.

Again, while this is a simple concept, there are a lot of things you can learn and apply to further improve your artistic foundation.

I hope you enjoy these concepts and the benefits provided by this simple lesson!

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