Take off your shoe...(laughter, giggling, smelly feet)...put it on the table. Have your partner cover your paper so you cannot look...and draw a Blind Contour of your shoe for 5 minutes. This is how we started this lesson - to see how doing a Blind Contour actually forces your eye to look harder at the lines you are following with your eye, because you cannot see them as you draw them.We then switched partners for another 5 minute round.
Then students drew from observation, after I gave a brief demo on how to draw my shoe (a Dansko clog). Drawing from observation is a bit harder for students, as now they can see what they are drawing, and some can be discouraged that it doesn't render exactly what their shoe looks like. But the blind contour exercise kept their spirits up.
We drew sections behind our shoe to add in some popping detail with markers.
