Continuous Line Drawing for Increased Skill and Meditation

This one line drawing exercise called contour drawing is an express lane to the flow state and that is the cure to many of life’s problems. Drawing is a good way to immerse yourself in meditation, improve your vibrations and skills all at once.

Continuous Line Drawings Provide This Zen Benefit

Meditation is unavoidable while drawing.  In this way, drawing is a key to peace.  I have found several other ways to get to this flow state including crochet, reading, knitting, writing, and painting, but this post highlights drawing and specifically one line contour drawing.

It might be true that all drawing is good meditation.  But continuous line drawing is especially so for me.  This particular style is in extra slow motion, so it will force other things to slow down too.  Like your breathing and your thoughts.  It is also a puzzle since you need to figure out how to reach each outer edge of your subject without lifting your pen off the paper.

The focus you need to do this drawing method will help you to be in the moment.  Time will seem to go slower.

Contour Drawing with Only One Line

This drawing started out with aspirations of being a one line drawing, but I kept stopping and losing my place.  I think there must be at least 20 lines in this work not including the hatching at the bottom that I added later.  Even so it still has the character of a contour drawing that I love.  I am very pleased with this one.

The process of making a contour drawing of any kind involves such intense concentration with no room for any negative inner voices that you are able to make a drawing quickly without advanced measuring for perspective.  It is remarkable that the drawing process itself is extremely slow, but the drawing evolves quickly.  The drawings are usually very expressive and delightful.  I don’t think I have ever seen a bad one.

This drawing of almost spent roses appears in my first YouTube video:

Please check it out and if you enjoy it, consider liking, subscribing and/or commenting to help the channel grow.  There are two more sketchbook tours in the hopper!

Benefits of Practice in Contour Drawing

This exercise sharpens your skills when making other kinds of drawings. Later you will notice how many opportunities you have to insert a contour line to emphasize edges in other drawings.

• Your hand eye coordination will be improved.

• You’ll be practicing your skills,

• getting into a deep meditative state,

• and making a handsome drawing all at the same time.

How to Draw a One Line Contour Drawing

If you practice this technique, I would be very interested to see your results.

There are many variations of contour line drawing.  This is how you do a one line continuous line drawing:

1.  Find a subject to draw.

2.  Start on the left side of the page (so you don’t smudge wet ink). Start on the right side instead if you are left-handed.

3.  Take your pen (not a pencil) and draw only the outermost edges of the subject.

4.  Go extremely slowly.

5.  Don’t pick up your pen off the paper.

6.  Travel around your subject with your pen line until you have come back to where you started, or until you feel like stopping.

7.   There is a version where you look down at your paper, and another version where you don’t called blind contour drawing.  Either way is a challenge.

Questions for You

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