Free Blind Contour Timer

Blind contour drawing, timed

In a blind contour drawing the eye follows the edge of the subject and the pencil follows the eye. You do not look at the paper. Kimon Nicolaïdes set the exercise out in The Natural Way to Draw, published in 1941, and Betty Edwards later taught it as pure contour drawing, according to Wikipedia's article on blind contour drawing.

A timer helps because every look at a clock is a look away from the subject. Here a chime begins the drawing and a chime ends it.

The four kinds

Pure blind: eyes on the subject for the whole drawing. With glances: eyes on the subject, with a short look at the paper each time the chime sounds, to find your place again. Continuous line: blind, and the pencil never leaves the paper, so the whole drawing is one line. Other hand: blind, with the hand you do not write with, which slows the line down.

Before each drawing there is a short pause for a new sheet, with a reminder of a way to keep the paper out of sight.

How the glances work

Choose a glance every 15, 30 or 60 seconds. At that moment a rising chime sounds and the screen says to glance at the paper. Three seconds later a low chime sounds and the eyes go back to the subject. The screen counts down to the next glance, and the results say how many were offered.

A glance is left out if the drawing would end before your eyes had been back on the subject for three seconds. If no glance fits, the page says so before you start. These rules are this tool's own.

Keeping time when the tab is not in front

Browsers slow a page in a background tab, and a timer that counts ticks falls behind. This one works out from the real time which drawing you are in and how many seconds are left, so it is right however long the page was away.

The chimes are set against the audio clock at the start. A locked phone can still silence a web page, so the tool asks the screen to stay awake during a session.

Blind contour drawing exercises to try

Your free hand, three times, one minute each, in a different pose each time. One object drawn in all four kinds, two minutes each, to feel how each rule changes the line. A house plant for one, two and five minutes: the long drawing is where the eye has time to slow down. A face in a mirror, with a glance every 30 seconds.

For gesture and timed poses, use the gesture drawing timer. For an idea of what to draw next, use the drawing prompt generator.

What it leaves out

You do not draw on the screen: this is an exercise for paper. The camera takes a still photo of the thing in front of you; it does not show a moving view while you draw. There are no levels, points or leaderboards.