Drawing Blind Contoures

Whoa, another post? Oh yessss, read on ;)

I had to catch up for our draw along so it was blind contour drawing time. It's really interesting how this goes. My first giraffe contour had quite a resemblance to the original photo and then some of the next ones too but it looks like my brain can't concentrate for a very long time doing this. And this manifests in shorter or longer lines which make the end result really funny :)  I just couldn't pull off the whole giraffe but could do reasonably well with only the head. Maybe I would improve over time but it was really quite different from the first lesson when I was drawing cats where I could see the improvement from one cat to another.

Here is my first batch of drawings; top right was the first page I did (and some are rotated):

Then I decided to do some other animals and I couldn't believe how hard it was to draw a really simple bird outline. This is really an interesting exercise. It looks to me as if I captured the things I thought were the most obvious or interesting. Like if the communication between my brain and hand went along these lines: "Line going slightly to left, slow down a bit, going up now, oh my does this eye look gorgeously big, nevermind this now, adjust the line please, it's supposed to go slightly more to the right and o nooo, this is a wrong angle, it's going to fall off the paper you ....". Some features "pulled" me away - they deconcentrated me - so I had to work really hard on following the outline if I wanted to draw something resembling the photos.

But I do love the results. I think these would look great on a T-shirt and I think I'll do one. Just don't know what to choose. Flower? Animal? Suggestions are warmly welcomed :)

This is my final drawing:

It was done with 3 outlines above one another and you can see the fourth one on the top left side (I'm not sure it was meant to be done this way but that's how I went about it). I colored everything with water soluble pencils and then almost chickened out for using water over them (it's because the results are usually not what I want them to be). But I did use water and after everything dried out went over with some ordinary colored pencils for a few touch-ups. I think I should just stop using the water ones or at least for the time until I figure out how to use them properly.

And if you are wondering about the paper I'm using - it's from a cereal box because I decided to somehow recycle them and because I plan to bind them all in a book once I have all the lessons finished. It should look pretty awsome - having everything in one fat book :)