Gather your tools.

Choose the Brush tool and use the Brush preset picker in the Options bar to select a brush. To replicate the look of drawing on paper, try the Ultimate Charcoal Pencil in the Dry Media Brushes set or the Classic Cartoonist brush from the Wet Media Brushes, set to 25 pixels. In the Options bar, adjust the Smoothing to 30%. Adjusting the smoothing will enable the brush to sail across the Artboard with less “friction”, allowing you to make quick, flowing lines.

Start drawing.

If you were doing a blind contour drawing on paper, we’d tell you not to look at your notebook as you gazed at a flower or mirror. But you’re on a computer, so we’ve created a blue top layer to hide your work. Leave it visible to the very end. Click on the Flower layer in the Draw Here! layer section, position your mouse over the blue square, look at the flower photograph, and start drawing. Don’t concentrate too hard on making it look exactly like the photo, and try not to stop and start with new lines—just keep the mouse moving until you think you’re done. It’s OK if you go outside the borders.

The Big Reveal.

Time to turn off the blue layer. Toggle the Eye icon off and you’ll be greeted by your flower drawing. You’ve probably made an interesting, funny , and perhaps even elegant line drawing—anything is possible when you’re not laser-focused on perfection. (Kathleen describes some blind contours as “spaghetti drawings”—and who doesn’t love spaghetti?)

Keep going.

Hide the Flower layer in the Look Here! layer section by clicking the Eye icon to reveal the flamingo photo. (Notice how the order in which layers are placed dictates what’s visible, like stacking pieces of paper on top of each other.) Click on the Bird layer and repeat the same steps as when drawing the flower. Now turn the Bird layer off, too, and hold the hand you don’t use to draw out in front of your face and draw that on the Hand layer.

But wait, there’s more.

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