lumanae asked:
ladyblargh answered:
THANK YOUUU that’s super flattering, i did use reference for those drawings but i do have a lot of it memorized generally also. i’ve been really lucky/blessed to have some incredible anatomy professors
hands and feet i’ve always been rusty on but i’ve always been good at gesture for hands. when cleaning up drawings of hands i actually have to fudge around quite a bit before it looks right. but the gesture is often good on the first try
one of the most helpful things for me was copying Preston Blair cartoon hands. Sounds dumb but actually copying preston Blair drawings was when I went from being pretty good at drawing to Good At Drawing. It’s the “construction method” he teaches that changed it for me!!
here’s the hands I copied
BUT ALSO!!! THIS IS IMPORTANT
PAY ATTENTION
Draw your own hands from observation!!
Allow yourself permission to make bad drawings for an hour, don’t spend more than 5 minutes on each drawing. Think of how the flesh is made of bone and flesh so there are squishy parts working with hard, non-squishy bone. Try to not think of it as drawing lines, but drawing forms, like a series of rounded cylinders smooshing against each other connected by hard bone. so draw form, not lines. when you draw a line, think about why that line is there. what is the form you’re drawing?? is it squishy? is it being pinched/squished by another form and creating a “cleavage” line? or is it hard? what’s underneath that skin? cool thing about drawing bodies is you have one. you can grab/palpate/poke/squish em while looking at anatomy books (if you want, not that necessary) and get an idea of what the shape of the form is.
something that helped me that my animation teacher taught me was to have a red or blue erasable pencil Col Erase pencil, draw the forms, then “knock it back” by rolling a kneeded eraser over the red drawing then go over it with your regular black lead pencil and draw the lines to show how the shapes overlap and all that. you don’t need to do it this way, and obviously you can do it digitally easily too!
I dont’ have my preston blair hands drawings but I did it with drawing characters. You can barely see the red lines but you can see i started out with basically squashed and stretched spheres/basic shapes. look up preston blair how to draw pages… and copy from them using the construction method. one of the most important things i ever did!!! looks silly but it AIN’T
Something I’ve also done is something called a blind contour drawing, which is where you draw something without ever looking at the drawing. itll look absolutely crazy but it doesn’t matter! just look at your hand, and draw what you see, and ideally never pick up your pen/pencil. it helps you see stuff you wouldn’t normally see if you were concerned with what your drawing looked like.
These are drawings of my hands I did like…. 4-5 years ago. i don’t think i have any blind contour drawings in here. don’t compare yours to mine, everyone’s look different and that’s a good thing. it’s just about learning to see, and understand, not about making it look good (you can do that later)
a separate matter altogether though is the body language of your hands and wrists, which is HUGE and subtle but i feel like there are some rules for it.. i could potentially do another post on it, but i might not.
Until then when drawing the cartoon hands think about the attitude each one of them has. like even if it seems like there’s none, come up with one like “curious” “delicate” “demanding” “sneaky” “timid”. hands are one of the most expressive parts of the body, followed by the eyes/eyebrows and shoulders. And so deciding that you’re drawing a timid hand instead of just a hand, that intentionality WILL eventually subtly bleed into your drawing and become more expressive.
I HOPE THAT HELPS!! SORRY it’s so long ppl who had to scroll!!
