The last couple of weeks I’ve been drawing hands. I always feel like I need to draw better and never make the time to do it. I have always liked drawing hands but my output is often pretty sketchy (pun intended). I have a book by George Bridgeman called A Hundred Hands which is one of the few art books I have a physical copy of and I’ve tried before to draw them all at one point or another. Thing is though even though there is more than hundred hand drawings in the book they are often not clear with the detail and when you are copying them you get to the point where the information you want is missing.

The challenge I gave myself was to draw a hundred hands myself. I often see people on the internet showing off their hundred heads or hundred expressions etc. and thought it was a good thing to do. What’s funny is that in doing it I reckon those people on the internet must have drawn way more than a hundred of what they were drawing to look so good. After drawing a hundred hands, and you can see from the images above, some of them are really not looking that great. A different angle or just a bad day at the easel is all it takes to throw the drawing out.

But that said it was really good to go over all the anatomy and learn to see again the angles and shapes of the hand. After doing it I really can’t say that I’m that much better at drawing hands or drawing in general but I’m definitely better at looking at hands and seeing all the angles and components.

I often struggle with the disconnect between drawing from life and drawing templates or symbols for things that live in my head. I find drawing from life pretty easy. But drawing from memory where you are using symbols and learned shapes is very different and that’s one of the things I wanted to get better at. So often I find that drawing is a mixture of the two ways of doing it and one definitely helps the other.

Another thing I found was that it was much more fun and better for the work to be looking at a variety of sources. While I started with George I quickly moved on to every other conceivable source of hands I could think of. I used images from online, copying from life, pinterest, every anatomy source I owned, old comics and old masters.

Anyway I’ve moved on to a hundred forearms and plan to work my way around the body for a few more weeks till I get sick of it and need to go back to doing all the other stuff that I love like making games, and 3D models and music.

Zulu out.