Hands

I like drawing hands – they’re interesting. I pulled off some okay drawings of static hands about a month back – but there was something a bit staged and even dead about them – my favourites from that time adopted unusual gestures or views (e.g. upraised fist or open palm) or tried to incorporate some of the contour drawing from the start of the first unit of the Drawing Foundations course – here are some examples:

The trouble was they were all of my hand – and my left hand. I held my hand in a fixed pose so I could draw it accurately – but the focus was then on my hand. But hands do things – that’s when they are really interesting.

Yesterday, my wife was repairing a necklace. I sat opposite her at the dinner table and became fascinated with the way her hands worked. I tried to draw her hands as they moved and you can see what I did in the following drawings. It was very difficult, but a lot more exciting than drawing my own static hand.

The first few are very scruffy and the hands often appear misshapen but they became more convincing the more I did I think. I learnt to draw while my wife’s hand was in a particular position, for example, when threading beads or stones onto a string and then waiting while the hand moved quickly and twisted this way and that until it returned to roughly the same position for a few seconds – then I would continue drawing briefly – this enabled me to produce the drawings in Jewellery Making 4 and 5.

What was surprising is that my wife’s ring finger often appeared longer than her index finger, but that was because her forefinger and index finger were slightly hooked as she worked beads onto the string. This sort of detail would never have emerged I think if I had stuck to drawing my own immobile hand.

Well, I’ve kind of jumped the gun a bit as I know we’ll be focusing on drawing hands or feet in a later unit, but I think its okay to mix subjects a bit if that is what is interesting at the time.