These Hands

Often, it seems, people want to avoid drawing hands. Put them behind a leg, or in the grass, or behind a head, or wrapped in fabric - just somewhere, anywhere they don't have to be drawn. Hands are complicated. People have a torso and two legs and two arms and a head. A hand has an arm and a wrist and a palm and four fingers AND a thumb. Not to mention knuckles and fingernails and all those intricate wrinkles and veins and sometimes even fine little hairs.

Like portraits, hands are expressive entities within themselves. How often has a hand carried more gesture and meaning than a face? Second to eyes, they can be used to express so much... if they can be drawn well.



The two drawings above were done for my current figure drawing class. The first was from life, of my own left hand, which was an incredibly awkward way to draw. The second was drawn from a photograph of my hand, and having the photo-reference allowed me to comfortably work over it for a longer time. These were done with charcoal on layout bond, a paper I'm liking more and more the longer I use it.

The big thing is, no matter how much anatomy you go over or how deeply you understand the various tendons and bones of the hand, it's drawn like any other thing. The knowledge of anatomy helps guide your eyes around the various landmarks - we know how the thumb is kind of like a turkey leg, with that big meaty part in the palm, and we know basic arc of the knuckles from one finger to the next. But as the hand twists and turns and moves about, we're forced to sight and measure it like any other object. Thankfully, with all those flat planes and long structures, the hand gives itself over to measurement really rather well.

I took photos as I drew my third project for the week, which was to be two hands interacting. I had some fun getting a reference photo of my right hand clipping a clothespin onto my left, giving them some emotion and expression. Like God granting Adam the touch of life, but OW!!! I worked on 18"x24" layout bond with vine charcoal and soft charcoal pencils.

The first step, as always, is the straight-line block-in. This is the most difficult step of any drawing. This is the foundation. Every angle must be sighted and every length must be measured. I used the length of the clothespin to measure everything else. This was all done in vine, which brushes right off the layout bond like it never existed.


Once the basic vine drawing looks accurate and clearly defines the two hands, I got out my sharpened 6B charcoal pencil and went over the outlines, following some of the more subtle curves and details of the forms. I also blocked in the basic shading, very loosely.


Then I ruined it all with a tissue by smearing everything around.

Actually, this is very important when working with charcoal, as this is where we do two things: cover our mistakes, and build up a midtone. By wiping out all the prior work, we also wipe out the plumb lines and various other lines used to build the sketch, and we give the whole drawing a nice layer of light grey.


Time to outline and shade again! Mostly shading this time around, being a bit more careful and detailed in the shadow areas. These are going to be the deepest shadows, the ones that really bring out the forms.



Then we wipe it out AGAIN. Really?? What??? What did that charcoal ever do to you? Well, I want a good midtone. Midtones so often get overlooked, which causes things to look severely lit and lose a lot of "roundness." So I like a nice medium gray. Now the fun begins.



Dudley is already having a lot of fun, see? =D



With the kneaded erasure sculpted into a thin wedge, the light areas and highlights are picked out. Any area that is not *absolutely* white gets smeared with my finger again to tone it back. What we're doing here is letting our five values gradually build up and blend together without a whole lot of effort on our part. When the lighter tones are in, the forms and details really begin to pop out.


The last stage is the longest and most tedious, especially depending on how much time I have and what kind of mood I'm in. Going back with the soft charcoal pencil, the outlines are carefully reintroduced, the shadows are deepened, and the details are brought to life. The tissue and the erasure come back into play, and there's a lot of finger smearing. It's all just plain diligence and a good bit of luck as to how the charcoal will lay and how the drawing when come together.




About 3-4 hours after the sketch was starting, the drawing is all done. I've been going over the smeary background a bit with a shamois, but there's not too much that can be done about it. For an academic drawing, though, it kind of looks appropriate.


In the end, hands are no more a mystery than anything else; they just demand time and attention. And they're so worth it when they come out right, so expressive and such bearers of humanity. So now and then, it's good to lift them out of the grass, or put them out in front of the clothing. It'll be worth it. =)

Practicing the Masters

When I was in 7th grade I took up the violin, followed by piano in 8th grade. For both instruments I took private lessons, and for both some of the first pieces I played were adaptations of works by Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Within a year, I was playing full compositions by these Classical master composers. It was expected. It was part of the learning process, to play these great works, even though I was just starting out.

Why is it then, after over fifteen years of working on my drawing skills, have I just now copied a Michelangelo?

It was also one of the most intimidating drawing exercises I have done.

It goes without saying that art education is fairly limited before one heads into art school (and even then it's iffy) but when I realized how long I had gone without even considering the idea of learning from the masters - and how intimidated I was by the thought of it - my jaw dropped. I have, in the past, done some oil copies of a few works, but never really with the intent to *learn*. When you're playing the violin and presented with a little ditty by Mozart, you don't learn it just to have a song to play; you learn it in order to play the violin better. Likewise, anyone with any interest in drawing should copy drawings by the old masters (or new masters, for that matter) not just to make a copy of a beautiful work, but to learn how to draw better.

What did I learn by making the copy of the Michelangelo above? I learned about the subtleties of anatomy that can't be learned by copying from the rigid diagrams of an anatomy book. I learned about the massive twisting gesture of the human torso that requires more "oomph" than it ever appears to. I learned how line can curve and strengthen and weaken and fade in order to describe a shape without outlining it. I learned how value can show depth and texture, the tilt of a head and even expression. And all of that built on the basics of capturing a pose through the usual block-in, measurement and sighting.

I could have been given a photo of a person in the same pose and never learned so much. I have been working from photos forever, and have ended up with very inexpressive lines and shading that is often too light and narrow in value. It's one thing to copy the subject of a photo; it's another to *capture* the subject, as the masters captured theirs. By copying their drawings we learn how they did it, even just a little, to add to our own bag of tricks.

The Michelangelo copy was an assignment in my current figure drawing class, and even though it seemed a bit out of place in the usual process of drawing from photos of live models, I found it immensely educational - as you can tell! It was followed the next week by the Raphael drawing below. By the time I had started the Raphael I had lost the sense of intimidation I had when faced with copying the Michelangelo; I felt like this was something I *should* be doing.

It's something everyone learning to draw should try from time to time, and definitely something that should be introduced in art classes and private lessons. Once again, it's all about breaking down the mystery surrounding art. It isn't magic. It's little different than any other creative skill. All it takes is practical experience and knowing how.

To Draw or Not to Draw

The time change has killed me this year for some reason. I am super-sleepy once again today. But this little experiment has been sitting around a while, so I figured I'd better finish up and get it up.

One of the things I most admire about a lot of illustrators today is how they can start with a few bloblike areas of color, and gradually refine these areas into figures or faces or environments. As I keep trying to do 30-minute sketches, I admire this skill more and more. How great would it be to not have to do a sketch first? So I thought I would give it a try.

Today's model is the lovely Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isenbeyeva. Long story. Lovely model, even for just a portrait. I'm posting the photo ref since for this it's really important to see where all I went wrong.


Last week I sat down and painted the following portrait outright. Just started painting with the photo ref open beside the canvas, no sketch first, just paint paint paint.


Uhhh, yeah. Ouch. You can tell what I thought of it by how I totally blew off everything surrounding the horribly badly proportioned face.

And yes, nose is always too big.

So I figured out that outright painting, for me, right now, would not work. I took some time (these were supposed to be 30-minute things again) and sketched from the same photo ref again, using my usual method for placing features, etc. This time we got...




Still not perfect, but BETTER. Definitely better, and definitely worth the time it took to do the drawing underneath. I didn't quite catch her likeness or expression, which I could see when I finished the sketch, but I went ahead and painted it anyway. I've finally gotten a handle on some brushes that work well with my old tablet on this computer, so I wanted to practice some with them.

Overall, a disappointing experiment, but one that has opened up a lot of other questions, such as what does it take to be able to paint outright? A better sense of proportions? Is there more drawing involved with the paint? Less guesswork than I was doing? Is there some way to take advantage of values and colors to help guide things?

More to learn, I guess. =) Always more to learn!

Monday School Stuffs

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

So Monday is the day I have to hand in my weekly assignments for my classes, so I thought I'd share them here, too. I'm taking figure drawing and figure modeling this semester at AAU, and most people ask me "How do you do figure drawing online?" or "are you making pottery with all that clay?"

To answer the first question, we draw from photos of the same models presumably used for the onsite classes (since the instructor seems to recognize a few). I usually print the photos up as 8x10's and tape them next to my drawing board on my easel. I know, it's not as awesome as drawing from a live model. But it is better than what a previous online drawing class had us do, which was a full-size self-portrait, yes, in the nude. I can't quite express how uncomfortable drawing oneself in front of a mirror *naked* is. For eight hours. Yeah.

I'm quite happy drawing from the photos. I also have one of the Virtual Pose books/DVD's that have lots of Quicktime models that can be rotated 360-degrees, so that's nice. At any rate, I've been drawing lots of figures from pictures.

The figure modeling class is much the same except it's sculpting of course, with 50-lbs of clay. I've never worked with clay before and I probably wouldn't choose to. It's very educational though, and kind of fun and pleasant at times.

Anyway, this week is the week before midterm assignments are due. The drawn figures are the most "complete" we've done so far.

This is the exercise for the week, charcoal on layout bond paper. I love how layout bond is toothy enough to hold a lot of charcoal, but will also clean off very easily too. It took some getting used to after working on the "soft" texture of charcoal paper, but now I like it very much.

Following here is a value study for the main assignment, also on layout bond:


Really lovely pose. One thing I'm working with a lot is line quality around the edges. I generally render everything to death so there's no outlines, so working with line is new to me.

Here is the final assignment, chalk and charcoal on toned charcoal paper. I have always wanted to draw on this stuff, mostly because I adore Pierre-Paul Prud'hon's drawings. What I had available here was incredibly expensive though ($2) a sheet, and the texture wasn't as workable or soft/toothy as I'd like. Anyway.


Lastly, I'll dare to share Pasta Lady, a.k.a my contrapasto-posed female sculpture. I have some BIG adjustments to make with her, but here is where she stands as it is tonight:


Yeeaaah... I dunno.

Next week for drawing I'll be copying a statue by Bellini and for sculpting finishing Pasta Lady there. I might not be updating here as much as I'll be putting a lot of hours in on those. Midterms!!!

And I have an Art History exam Wednesday but I'm not too worried about that. Hard to believe the semester is half-over! Spring is coming soon. =)

It's not at all what you think

Drawing is hard. One of the things that makes drawing difficult is nothing is anything like anyone would said it would be. At times, drawing is the world's most disappointing exercise. You go in thinking you know exactly how you'll approach everything, then you find out that nothing you're looking at is quite as you thought it was.

Tricky that way.

In the end, drawing is a puzzle. It's a matter of seeing how things fit together, then fitting them together again yourself. That line intersects that other line at a 45-degree angle. The finger meets the thumb one inch from the first joint. The round of the shoulder makes a shape like a teardrop. These are all abstractions, but at the same time, they describe a truth that's hard to replicate unless it is abstracted. You can't just "draw a nose". A nose isn't a nose. It's a combination of lines and forms that create the shape we recognize as a nose.

Realistic drawing is perhaps even more an abstraction than abstract drawing, when you think of it. Or else, you could say, the abstract artists just take it all two-hundred steps further.

At any rate, my thirty minutes went by very quickly today and ended up turning into 40 minutes before I decided I had to stop and get on with the day. I still haven't found the brushes I want in Painter, but I'm getting there. At least I know what I want to look for.

One of the real challenges of drawing digitally - unless you're lucky and have something like a Wacom Cintiq - is that you can't bring your measured angles via sighted-along-a-pencil to the page. All I've got under my hand is this blank gray 4x6 plastic pad and and my drawing is sitting vertically on the screen in front of me. More challenges.

Anyway, here is the result of 40 minutes with a photo of Helen Mirren.


Yeah, I didn't get near finished. "You didn't even add a highlight to her lips! That would have only taken a moment!"

But I'd gone on 40 minutes already! Ah well, practice practice.

Some days...

Some days you have just gotten your shiny new blog straightened out, and you want to have some shiny new stuff to put on it. So, some days you sit down to do your 30-minute speedpaint practice, and some days things don't come out well at all. So some days you just have a couple sketches from the night before to put up.


So we have a nifty action-sketch of Shu Qi from the movie So Close. It's a very fun movie. I don't do dynamic poses often, so it was a challenge. Hands are fail.

I also don't do non-standard body types often, so last night I sketched this burly guy from my Virtual Pose DVD:


Last night I was all "RAWR! I'm going to do FIVE FIGURES BEFORE CHOPPED COMES ON!!" Well, I did these two. This morning got eaten up with domain/website issues, emails that needed answering, and further fiddly bits. Sometimes there seems to be more administration going on than artwork, but I'm not always putting up new blogs sites and updating my website and everything every day either.

I am going to sit down with Painter now and figure out a nice brush set for basic drawing/painting. At very least I *attempted* my 30-minute drawing today.

As far as schoolwork goes, I have to tear down my lovely clay man to make way for a lovely clay woman. And download the tutorials for the week. And practice some figures for the figure drawing class. Thankfully this week and next are set aside for midterms for my art history class, so not much to do there.

I'm beginning to be a little miffed at my figure drawing class, because it really should be requiring a lot more than the assignments are giving. I mean, last week we had one figure and a portrait assigned. This week it's two figures. Now granted, each week we look at different aspects of how the figure can be seen and drawn, and each week we bring them to a higher level of finish, but the assignments just don't even suggest the amount of *practice* that should be going on. I mean, figure drawing is something that you have to put time into, work on constantly, do figure after figure, if you want to really get a good feel for it. Just doing one or two a week isn't going to cut it.

So expect to see more sketches like those above. I will get back to painting when I get Painter figured out here, or when the big PC in the other room starts behaving and not shocking itself to death every time I touch the desk the wrong way.

As an extra bonus, here is a link to a great tutorial on drawing heads. I've been using this method for a couple months now and really like it!

Moving Over

First official post in my shiny new blog. I'm moving here in part to get out of Deviant Art, and in part to create a better front page for my website. Please be patient with formatting and design of this page as I fiddle with things - I like it well enough now, but there's always more that can be done! This will work for the time being.

The blogger URL here will always work, but I hope eventually to get the dekraus.com domain to point here as well.

I'm also hoping to post fairly often, even if it's only the day's sketches. I've been trying to do 30-minute portraits every day, usually of my WoW characters. For an example, here's today's!

I just got a new MacBook Pro that runs Painter beautifully, but I'm using an *old* small Wacom tablet with it, and really need to take some time to find the right brushes to work with it. It's great to be able to paint whenever, sitting here on the couch, but still very clumsy compared to the setup I have on the desktop in the other room.

Good enough for sketches though.