Week 6 - Hands Recap

 This week we studied hands again, having a look at more dynamic poses that would be useful for drawing characters in action poses like casting spells.

First of all we did a recap on the general structure of a hand:

The sketch in the top left is a diagram of the key elements of a hand: 6 lines for the palm and wrist, a thumb mass, the knuckles, etc. The thumb and index fingers go on the side where the third line is shorter, and the thumb kind of lines up with the first knuckle of each finger. The pink sketch in the bottom left is meant to be the thumb and little finger pinched together to get that angle, which I then used for the palm up/down practice sketches. The palm down I copy and pasted to change the opacity on one of them so you can see the underlying structure better.

After that, we got started on some practice sketches of more dynamic hand poses:

This one is traditional because we were drawing off of the whiteboard/powerpoint/main screen, which I had sat facing away from, so I figured it would be easier to turn around with the sketchpad than to contantly be looking behind me and then drawing onto my tablet. The hands are a bit warped here as I've only really practiced drawing hands with longer fingers.

For all of these sketches, I drew over the reference/ traced where the knuckes are, then brought it over to a blank space and drew the rest of the hand following the structure covered at the start of the lesson.

 

 

 

 Lots of conductor hands here, they're good wizzard/ spellcaster poses The sketches labelled 1-3 are mine, the larger thumb sketches were done by the lecturer, Sam, he drew those to demonstrate drawing thumbs from a front view where it's kind of an oval/blob shape. The first sketch was using the hand structure more rigidly, the second was more of a freestyle so I could really exaggerate the curve of the fingers, and the thrid sketch sort of combines both approaches and fixes the thumb.

 

These last two are of Master Hand and Crazy Hand from the Super Smash Bros. series (Nintendo 1999) which are 3D models rather than real hands, so they're probably not the best to use as references, but I knew they'd have some good poses, so here they are. You can see where I've traced the knuckles, and in the case of crazy hand the negative space, to get the general structure before going in and drawing the hands.

 

Finally, we had a challenge to draw our own hands within a brief time limit, and then we had to draw the inverse of that from our own imagination:

 

 That note at the bottom is so that I don't forget we have to draw a total of 50 hands, the ones from class count (17, or 14 if you don't count the initial diagrams as well as the Master and Crazy Hand) which means I have 33-36 more hands to draw over the next few weeks. I'm going to try and make sure I collect a variety of references for these for the sake of practicing different types of hands, as I'm only really good at drawing kind of spindly bony hands.

 

 

 

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