Continuous line drawing is a fabulous exercise for developing hand-eye coordination and observation skills. To do it you place your pen or pencil on the surface and do not remove it until the drawing is complete. The goal is to describe the subject with one, singular line. The line should not be broken at any time during the process. 

This exercise forces the artist to closely observe the perceived lines of a subject but one of the things to understand is that these drawings won't be perfect and thats ok. I believe it's the imperfections that make the drawings so visually interesting. The idea is to go slow and steady and not to rush.

You may have seen me do a few blind contour drawings throughout this project. Blind contour drawing is slightly different in that the artist makes a continuous line but does NOT look at the drawing surface, only the subject. With continuous line drawing you are allowed to look at both the surface AND the subject. 

I find that using a pen is best for this exercise as you're not tempted to erase any mistakes. Here I used a 0.5 fine liner pen. I drew the same horse twice. The first one (see photo above) was drawn using my right hand. Then I flipped the reference photo around the other way for the second drawing (see photo below) and tried the same process using my left hand 😱 I also tried adding more shaded areas to this one, going back and fourth over the same line. 

I'm not sure if this would work well when I'm drawing from life but I may give it a go and see how I get on.