For the first day of this new month I felt like returning to contour drawing and, more specifically, doing this with the aid of a grid. As mentioned before this process is all about making it easier to draw an object accurately rather than relying entirely on my ability to draw by eye. So I decided to return to an object which I've previously drawn here with mixed success:
Starting with the grid then I lined out 3cm squares in my pad and began the process of sketching the important contours. This sounds laborious (almost by rote copying) but in practice it remains an artistic process; the guidelines simply indicate where intersections need to occur if your want your proportions to work. What the squares don't tell you is exactly where to draw your lines and how you should draw them for the best effect. This is why you end up with a result like this:
There's no doubt that my contour drawing is a much closer match to the photograph then anything that I could have achieved by eye and the scale of things like they key is correct. However the picture is still an interpretation and certain features, most obviously the lettering, aren't perfect and quite clearly aren't the result of direct copying. So I remain happy with this technique and quite fancy applying it to more organic structures like a flower in bloom.