If you've been bopping in and out of the Authorstrator chat or hanging out around Notes or my Instagram, you might have noticed I started the 100 Days Challenge. I am endeavoring to devote some time, however much or little, every day, for 100 days, to progressing some aspect of my creative life. I am endeavoring to improve my abilities in drawing that most tricky of human anatomy - hands! That's right. It's time I stop avoiding them and really buckle down to get better at drawing hands.
And while I'm excited to finally get better at drawing hands, a question needles at the back of my mind, over and over again. Why, in the age of AI, am I bothering devoting hours to an admittedly tedious and annoying, often frustrating, practice like hand doodles, when I could, probably in the next couple years, just type "better hands, please" and get exactly what I'm looking for?
I don't know.
Stubbornness maybe. A big middle finger to the generative intelligences (pronounced: tech bros) begging me to give up thought and skill for something fast and easy and derivative. Don't develop. Don't collaborate. Just stick on your VR goggles and lay back. Hush little girl, they whisper, let us take care of everything....until you can't take care of anything. No thanks. After all, I committed to a punk rock attitude on AI a while back. And what's more punk rock than making SURE I have the skills to just handle it all myself? It takes more effort, more time. But it's mine.
I get it, I get it. Everyone is going to be using these tools and moving really really fast. But does fast make something good? I don't know. I saw the Sora video generator. It just looked flat and boring to me. And.....sheened. Like Neo emerging from the Matrix goo. It’s all glossy in the grossest way. If this is what we can look forward to in film making....what are we looking forward to exactly?
And that’s not even mentioning the wrongness of the images and videos these tools produce, the way it breaks the rules of physics on the regular, and not in an interesting way. Maybe, however impressive it looks at first glance…it just can’t make me hands the way I want them done? You know, with style?
I don't know.
And that's the thing - I don't know. I don't know what the world looks tomorrow, don't know where technology will go. But I DO know that I am bad at drawing hands. And I can work on fixing that.
Doodle
What I'm working on
I’ve been spending most of my evenings scribbling hands, in case you didn’t guess as much already. The first few days I spent just drawing hands from reference and not thinking much beyond : “Draw hands better.” I’ve realized I need to be more strategic, and figure out not just how to draw hands - but what’s the best method to do it in the simplest way? I will share more about what I’m doing in my next post for Paid subscribers.
I got to talk art and drawing expressions with my dear friend
for The Sketchbook Games! It was fun sharing what I think about drawing expressions, how I do it. Check it out!Lava Cat Cruise Ship is posting on Fridays on Authorstrator! Chapter two just dropped this past week - you can check it out here, in the LCC section of the newsletter. In case you missed it, Lava Cat Cruise Ship is the second of my stories set in the Zombie Shark Highway universe. I so hope you have as much fun reading this zombie high seas adventure as much as I did writing it.
Stacks to share
Speaking of AI, this post about its inability to understand left handedness was a lot of fun.
As someone who’s over struggling on Instagram, this post from
hit me in the feels.
Punk rock attitude towards AI...I love it haha!!! Ya know, I feel like as far as AI may go, I just don't believe it will supplant everything entirely for exactly these reasons--there's just...no personality? no character? And that's what we crave in art and story. Anyway your hand drawings are amazing!!
Oh hands are tricky, I try to draw as little of them as possible and as simply as I can!! Although having also read the AI piece you referenced, I’m confused how AI manages to create hands with more than the standard number of digits, when statistically, 5 is the most common! 😂😂 I agree that AI generated images look slightly off, sometimes in a way that’s hard to define, but I feel it in my gut. Thanks for the mention!! 💛