Off-topic: Every week, my drawing course blows my mind a little bit

I'm doing a drawing course at the moment, on Monday evenings - I don't know why you need to know that - and I'm really enjoying it. It's fascinating how much about art I don't know. Every week, I learn something that blows my mind a little bit.

We had this wonderful lesson on contour drawing, for example - I think that's what you call it. It's where you look at someone, or something, and you try and replicate it without taking your pencil off of the paper.

The idea is to approach it a bit like you're sculpting it, and make lines on the paper as if they were your thumbs smoothing over a cheek, or around the side of the skull, or across the ridges of a forehead. And by doing this, over and over, you start to build a pile of lines which slowly resemble the subject. It's almost eerie. And yes, it looks a bit weird, but actually, within the image, there's often a much stronger resemblance of the thing you're drawing - a better capturing of its essence, if you like - than drawing a traditional way.