Weekly Art Practice - Week 4

Honestly surprised that this is 4 for 4 this month. Maybe I can do a blog post every week. Though I suspect committing to extremely minimal social time for January and my workplace being a disaster has contributed to having enough time to pull it off.

Anyway, I hope you like looking at hands. I don’t find them as exciting as pigeons or squirrels but after a few weeks of easy-ish creatures I wanted to try something that would be a serious push. And which would be applicable to more art pieces. I have an animation I’ve been working on that’s taken twice as long because of how much time I’ve spent fighting with the hands. Ended up going with a very blob like shape in the end just to keep making progress. Time to see if a week of hands can carry me through drawing more hands in the future.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination

The first thing I noticed about this week is that it’s difficult to draw hands without a reference. They are right there, doing the work, you can’t look away. I tried my best to not do any posing or staring at my hands for too long in hopes of forcing my brain to think of the shapes itself.

Day 2 - Speed sketching

Day two I gave myself more freedom to look at local hands while also using some references.

Day 3 - Reference Drawing

Now with more serious references in play, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t render hands too much. When you start looking at the specific details and shapes fingers make in photos, they sometimes translate terribly when putting them to paper. There’s also just so many wrinkles and curves that it’s easy for a hand to become muddy very quickly.

There were 9 hands here but I just went with one or else this could have been the only reference image I needed. Thumb up seemed like a nice starting point. Keep most of the fingers partially hidden.

Fingers coming towards the camera has always been a weakness of mine. I find it very difficult to convey the depth in a hand so that each finger is still readable.

Another coming towards the camera one, proof I was trying to challenge myself. This hand is one of the ones that helped me see how strangely angular hands can be.

And then holding a ball. Often if I’m doing a character drawing the character is often holding or touching something so object interaction is a pretty important shape to practise for me.

Day 4 - Style study

After my conclusion of “too much detail = bad” I was excited to get some ideas for simple approaches. I’m often drawing hands on small characters where the hand isn’t the focus but is often trying to communicate something. I just need enough details for it to be clear what kind of action the hand is doing.

Started with fingers. Seems to make sense to start with the small part of a bigger object. I’m pretty familiar with the tube or sausages approach to drawing fingers but this was the first time I saw it done with a variety of perspectives.

Reference: Screenshot from a how to draw hands vide.

I enjoy the box breakdown of hands, really helps to keep the 3D shape of the hand. But as I worked on these I did start to feel like they were too realistic to really be a style study.

Reference: Tweet.

Now here are some hands that really embrace the angular-ness of fingers! Each finger looks so strong and expressive. But look at them the wrong way and I get confused at what I’m looking at.

Reference: Kiwi Byrd Patreon.

I fell in love with this style. So sleek and simple but so expressive. The lines are easy to draw after a few tries and it just felt good. I didn’t commit to carrying this style through all my other practices but it’s definitely something filed away in my mind now.

Reference: Dom "Scruffy" Murphy on ArtStation.

I caught this one last minute on Pinterest right before I started my drawing session. It was a style different from the other 2 previous ones, more cartoony, which was very much something I wanted to try. Just get even simpler but also rounder and cuter. It makes the hands stand out less but possibly easier to execute.

I was enjoying these so I took some photos and tried to adapt those poses with the style.

Reference: Freepik.

Day 5 - Drawing from imagination, take 2

Test day. After my coloured pigeon piece from last week I decided that I wanted to do something like that as a final project of sorts for each theme. So I started day 5’s drawing time with some sketches, mostly trying to capture the styles that I had practiced the day before.

Then I wanted to do something a little more detailed. Something that could be part of a larger piece where maybe the focus of the illustration is on the hands.

My girlfriend says this looks like a tattoo design and after she said it I could see it. Add a bit more ling definition to the flame and it could be a weird clavicle piece.

Conclusion

It will get tedious to keep saying “I’m shocked at how much 4 days of practice does!” it does still feel like that every day 5. I honestly enjoy drawing hands but do find it difficult. I think a big part of learning from this week was once again to embrace very simplified styles. And maybe adopt a drawing approach of continuous practice…

I’m happy that this week wasn’t as hard as I feared. It didn’t feel overly difficult compared to the creatures from before. And having pages full of floating hands looks pretty cool.

Later today I’m attending an online art lesson on the character design process by one of the Drawfee hosts, so I might have a project to blog about from that. I also have a few other fully coloured pieces from the last few months that I haven’t included anywhere. And my attempts at vector art to be the new icons for this site. So I may have multiple posts over the next few weeks. While also trying to prepare and participate in Funguary again.

My hands Pinterest board with all my reference images can be found here.