Oh hi there, happy March!
So here we are, day 12 of the 100 Days Project and I am suddenly very aware of just how many days 100 days actually is. It's a lot of days. But you know? Hands are such a puzzle, I think a hundred days to get a handle on them is absolutely necessary. And more than that, I'm enjoying having time every day to be intentional, border-line clinical, in my work. So much of my illustration journey has been trial and error and vibes, leap frogging from interest to interest. I've always been drawn to facial expressions to tell stories through my characters - stretching and squashing the muscles of the face to push emotion. It's always been fun for me and so its been the central focus of my studies. Hands have always been intimidating (translation: less fun). But they can be just as expressive as the face and are a powerful tool to portraying character. By neglecting them, I've done my drawings a disservice. By zeroing in on hands for 100 days, I feel focused in a way that's new to me and I'm surprised at the progress already.
My goals for myself in taking on this challenge are twofold:
1. Just be better - fully grasp the anatomy of the hand and be more convincing in the way that I draw them. Know how hands work, bend and twist in 3D space.
2. Be faster, work smarter - If you've tried to learn how to draw hands, you've seen the step by step break downs - draw a paddle, a box or a circle, draw the sections of each finger as a stick, as cylinders, build the hand by brick and beam and wire. For my purposes (drawing graphic novels), breaking the hand down this way from panel to panel to panel is cumbersome and time consuming. My ultimate goal is to develop my own shortcuts/basic shapes that make drawing ands fast and efficient.
And even though there's still 80 some odd days to go, the first 12 have illuminated some things about hands for me that I thought I'd share.
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