To help you understand how important blind contour drawing is, consider this scenario: Without superb observation skills at your disposal, you are almost lost as an artist. It is a great drawing exercise that not only boosts your eye-coordination prowess but helps you to understand that representational drawing is all about been a keen observer. You simply go about the entire drawing process without ever looking at your paper.
With this type of drawing technique, an artist spends 100% of his time staring at the object he is trying to draw and zero percent of his time on the paper. Just as the name implies, blind contour drawing refers to when the contour is drawn without looking at the paper at all! The purpose of blind contour drawing is to train you to always look at the object you are drawing than at your drawing paper.Ī blind contour drawing simply means that you draw blind and draw an object without ever staring at your pencil or paper. The experience of staring at the reference object is not restricted by looking at the drawing paper, your drawing comes out as a truthful representation of the object. The contour drawing technique allows you to focus all your attention on the model rather than the usually divided effort of staring alternatively at the model and paper.įor this reason, you can effectively follow and implicate forms to their most logical conclusion and learn how and where they relate to other forms. The illusion of three-dimensional form in contour drawing is often achieved by varying the lines’ weight, using relatively darker lines in the foreground and paler lines in the background. That is to say that it indicates the length and thickness, and width of the form it represents. On the other hand, a contour drawing boasts a three-dimensional quality. It is the sort of thing you create when you place your feet on a flat piece of paper and trace around your toes with a pencil, just a simple representation of the main object. To be more precise, an outline is a two-dimensional diagram. However, it is imperative to note that there is a slight difference between an outline and contour. Figure 5 shows the result of contour lines.įigure 5.Contour is usually described as the outline of a body or figure. The result can be seen in the QGIS map canvas without closing the contour plugin window, therefore we can switch back to change a parameter if the result not looks as we want. Furthermore the color graduation for the contour lines can be changed by selecting a color ramp for the output contour lines.Ħ. In the next setting we can specify the precision and unit for the contour label. The output will be written to memory, so we need to export to it to a GIS file to keep it permanently.ĥ. Moreover the interval can be edited manually by double click the interval number.Ĥ. We can tweak the number if the interval is not correct. When we set the calculated number, the contour interval can be seen in the right list. Then the number of contour line will be: maximum elevation/contour interval. For example if we want to make a contour map in 100.000 scale, then the contour interval will be 1/2000 x 100.000 = 50 m. We can set any number, but I suggest the number of contour line follows the rule of thumb as mentioned above. Next, we have to define the number of contour lines. In the contouring menu, we can choose to create contour line, filled contour or both.
Select the point's layer name and the elevation data field. The contour plugin window will appear as in figure 4.ģ. Open the Contour plugin by clicking the icon. Add the points into QGIS map canvas as in figure3.Ģ. Now, let's make contour lines from points dataset with the following steps:ġ.
#Definition of contour lines in art install#
Check it and Install the plugin if you don't have it in your QGIS 3. You will see the Contour plugin appears as in figure 2. As usual we can get the plugin from Plugins menu > Manage and install plugins. To create contour lines from points, we are using Contour plugin.