Two Studies

If I’d wanted to, I could have made an academically correct drawing with the proportions of the figure corresponding to what I actually saw. But I chose not to. More often than not, I choose to distort a little, trading anatomical correctness for statuesque drama. In this pose, about twelve minutes, I dramatized the figure to make it look as if seen from below, like a statue on a pedestal. The feet are big and the head is small. In other words, I foreshortened the figure. Why? It’s fun to see if you can achieve a certain effect by breaking the academic rules.
Then, during a seated pose, I got fascinated by the hands and the neck. I zoomed in for anatomical correctness. I repented, ha.
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Hands Forever

Treat yourself to an afternoon of drawing hands!
Hands. Are you kidding?
The hand is arguably the most difficult thing to draw. It takes some practice. But, look, there’s no excuse, it’s always there. Just draw it.
Actually drawing your left hand (or your right hand if you’re a lefty) is not that easy, since it’s hard to hold it steady and in a comfortable position. Therefore, I recommend that you draw from photos of hands, which are ubiquitous in our ad-crazed culture. Your desk is full of junk mail showing hands holding a product or pointing to one. It’s not junk mail, it’s a treat.
Barbara Heaton in my drawing class worked from a photo of two hands. She drew with a graphite stick on white textured paper that she had previously rubbed gray with graphite powder. The white highlights were created by erasing the graphite down to the original white paper, about 12”x14”. Is this not breathtaking?
This is classical drawing. I hope it never gets boring.
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Drawing Hands

Hands.  Oh, no!

But hands are just more of the same: shapes, shapes, shapes.

Easier said than done.

Of course, drawing hands is hard.  They’re so complicated!  Downright weird sometimes.

The tendency is to either overwork them or to just put down some scratchy lines and walk away from the challenge.

The challenge is to practice drawing the beasties so much that you get to the point where you can gracefully suggest the gesture of the hand without belaboring it.  Easier said…

I brought in Xeroxed copies of these two hands clasping.  Turns out, you can put your non-drawing hand into the position of each of the two hands, more or less, and study the anatomy of your fingers to make sure you know what the photo is showing.

I did the demo, pointing out that you always draw from the general to the specific: draw shapes, not fingers. The fingernail should be faintly suggested, nothing more. Easier said…

One of the things I stress when we work from photos is that the drawing will not duplicate the photo.  The drawing “translates” the photo into its own visual language.  The students said that my drawing made the hands look more energetic than they are in the photo.  Yesss!!  Once you see that, you’re half way there.

Now all you have to do is practice.  Practice drawing hands!  A most rewarding way to spend an hour a day.  Think of it as a treat.  Instead of staying, now I’m going to sit down and practice drawing, say, woo-hoo, now I’m going to treat myself to an hour of drawing.

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Hand Studies

Hands are considered hard.  So is playing the Moonlight Sonata.  You do have to practice the hard bits.  And then, when you’re working on drawing the figure, the head or the torso, getting the hand in there will be a delight.  Here are some classroom examples.  Notice how lively a page of studies of hands can be.  Just hands.  Love it!

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John Singer Sargent’s Hands

John Singer Sargent (1856 -1925) was an American painter who lived much of his productive life in Europe.  He has lately fallen out of favor with the art scene, probably because his clients were the super-rich and the crème de la crème of the Belle Epoche art world.   On a deeper level, however, our dismissal of him may be about envy:  the man could draw and paint with the kind of ease and finesse that contemporary artists just don’t have the time for or motivation to develop.  It does take time, you know.

Today I want to focus on the way he painted hands.  In his stately portraits, the hands appear to be dashed off in a few brush strokes.  If you look closely at the canvases, you can see that a finger often is rendered with one sure flick of the brush as the hand grasps some gauzy or lacy fabric. You can’t believe that he did that and you just want to give up, certain that you’ll never be able to draw a hand.

Then there’s Mrs. Swinton at the Chicago Art Institute.  The portrait is four feet wide and almost eight feet high. A very young woman with a wholesome Ingrid-Bergman-face asserts her status in society.  Sargent documents her sartorial finery and dazzles us with his bravura brush work. The highlights on the satin gown are globs of cream-white paint; the shine on the chair upholstery is rendered in slashing brush strokes, as if in passing.

Then you notice the hands. Both of Mrs. Swinton’s hands are positioned to convey hauteur. Her right hand is twisted back over the chair in a supercilious, affected manner.  This gives Sargent a chance to show us that the anatomical difficulty of this oblique view does not faze him.  He nails it in a few brush strokes.

The left hand on the hip, however, gave him a work out.  Here he’s not showing off, he’s not flicking the brush to get the tapered fingers in place.  This passage in the painting is labored, with the paint applied in many thick layers. You can empathize with his struggle if you’ve ever tried to draw a hand and maybe you feel relieved to know that even a wizard like Sargent can have a bad day with hands.  Actually, it’s odd that this hand, which is so relaxed, with the fingers nicely aligned, would give him trouble. But clearly, it did.

Hands are difficult, no doubt about it.  The anatomy is complex and it can come at you in so many different angles. Still, you can learn to draw hands. When we do hands in my drawing class, I sit next to individual students and show them how to tame this beast.  Basically, there are three main points:  1) the knuckles form a V; 2) draw the general form of the whole hand first; and 3) don’t overdraw the fingers, especially not the finger tips.

If the mighty Sargent can spend hours scraping and glopping over a left hand on a canvas, you can forgive yourself for drawing a clumsy hand, too.  It gets better with practice and eventually you’ll pull off a really elegant set of fingers.  Not every time, but enough of the time to look forward to the challenge and the pleasure (!) of drawing a hand.

Sometimes my students’ progress is startling. After one brief demo, a student will draw a page of hand studies that shows a sudden grasp of all the points I’ve demonstrated.

 

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