Abstract: Occlusion contours are a natural feature to draw when tracing an object in an image or when drawing an object. We investigate the development of 3D models from multi-stroke contour drawings with the help of a 3D template model that serves as a shape prior. The template is aligned and then deformed by our method to match the drawn contours. At the heart of this process is the need to provide good correspondences between points on the contours and vertices on the model, which we pose as an optimisation problem using a hidden Markov model. An alternating correspond-and-deform process then progressively deforms the 3D template to match the image contours. We demonstrate the method on a wide range of examples.