Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to demonstrate an awareness of their other senses, in particular the sense of touch, through exploring the variety of pressures applied to drawing tools, and the emphasized awareness of arm, hand and finger movements while drawing.
• Students will be able to become aware of one’s own body in relation to drawing.
• Students will be able to become sensitized to the physicality of drawing mediums and to the physical variations of the layers in a drawing.
• Students should be open to allowing chance to take place and letting unexpected accidents to happen.
• Students will demonstrate an understanding of the possibility for intuition and instincts to play a greater role in the drawing process.

Project Description

Materials

• Some sort of blindfold
• 2 sheets of white or off-white paper, 18 x 24 inches minimum in size
• 3-4 sheets of heavy duty paper or cardboard
• Chalk or oil pastels (preferably oil pastel – if using oil pastel you will need something to scrape and scratch the oil pastel away)
• Charcoal
• Rubber Eraser for subtracting chalk pastel, charcoal, chalk line dust, or graphite powder.
• Pencils, markers, and colored pencils
• At least 15 Stencils and Templates
• (Optional) Chalk line dust or graphite powder – if you use either of these mediums bring a dust mask.

Directions

Read through the assignment before class and answer these questions in your sketchbook.

• How do our senses help define the world we live in?
• How might one of our senses allow us to know something about a place, object, etc more or less than another of our senses?
• Watch the video below on Chance and Randomness and take notes in your sketchbook. What was Dada?
• Read Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings (Began series in the 1970’s) and bring a printed copy to class. You may also want to look over some of the work here.

You will be creating two drawings. The first drawing will be done with your stencils but blindfolded. The second drawing will also be done with the stencils but you will not be blindfolded. Focus on the way the shapes and stencils feel in your hand. Notice the differences between the sighted drawing and the blind drawing. The blind drawings are usually much more energetic, partly because you don’t know for certain what you are doing but also because you are making aesthetic judgments on your drawings. You are allowing yourself to just draw.

Using heavy-duty paper, create an assortment of stencils and templates of various sizes and shapes. Some of the stencils/templates should be considerably larger than your hand while others may be same size or smaller than your hand.

To make stencils: cut out (or tear) shapes in materials such as paper and or cardboard (the shaped hole in the material is the stencil, the shape removed from the material to create the shaped hole is the template). Geometric shapes may include squares, rectangles, circles and triangles and a combination of those shapes. Organic shapes may include blob shapes and/or bean shapes and/or asymmetrical clover shapes. Or you may find some ready made stencils or templates that are abstract. The more ambiguous and abstract the stencil the more successful your drawing will be in reaching the assignment objectives.

As you draw blind folded you will feel each cut out stencil and template to trace and layer shapes in your drawing using an additive and subtractive process. You may place a stencil down and fill it in, place a different stencil on top and erase it out. Don’t be afraid to go all the way to the edge of your sheet of paper as you work. No peeking through your blindfold!

Research / Examples