Contour Drawing is Fun - Sunflowers and Hydrangeas

I have been finding some exciting and awesome artists on the web these past few months. Their work inspires and energizes me.  Going through my past year's SketchingEveryday drawings, I realized that I have not done much contour drawing. Sure, I did a few blind contours as warm-up exercises each summer, but  drawing the contour of something can be so much more! Case-in-point, check out Nora MacPhail's contour drawings with watercolor on her blog. Aren't they fun? 


Here are yesterday's and today's line drawings. I decided to try a couple of my favorite flowers (Sunflowers and Hydrangeas) in modified blind contour drawing. I say modified, because I did look at the paper (about 20 percent of the time) while I was drawing. 80 percent of the time, however, I only looked at the reference while my pencil moved. I like how these came out for study accuracy, but they look stiff to me. I decided I'd challenge myself a little more on these and do each one in watercolor four times. Each time, I'll vary my approach and technique. So far, I've got two sunflowers done and two on the board for tomorrow. You can see today's paintings here.