Drawing Hands

 This was my drawing homework over the weekend.

Now before you think I have some serious vision deficiencies or just really terrible hand/finger coordination, let me explain the rules for this homework. Yes, RULES. Or at least I like to think of them as rules:

1) draw three pictures of your hand; 

2) draw only the contours of your hand (no shading or filling in stuff); 

3) one of the pictures has to be of your right hand--so you have to draw it with your left hand;

4) you can't look at the paper, you can only look at your hand (the posed hand, not the drawing one).

Did you catch that last one? NO LOOKING AT THE PAPER AS YOU DRAW. This is really hard to do. 

So these are my three "blind contour" drawings of my hands. What do you think? Can you tell that one was drawn with the left hand? Keep in mind that if you pick up your pencil and forget where you put it down, you are pretty much screwed and you just have to guess where to start drawing again.

Here are some more hands from drawing class that we worked on in class on Monday. With these drawings, there was more leniency on looking at the drawing. For instance, you could look to see where to put down your pencil to begin a mark, then look away as you actually drew it. Also, these were copied from other drawings which is much easier task than drawing a real hand. When you draw from a two-dimensional thing, it has already demystified how to make something two-dimensional look three-dimensional, so you just kind of copy that. When you draw an actual three-dimensional thing, you have to figure out how to represent it on a flat piece of paper all by yourself.

I've found that I really like the nuances of hands. I think I would like to draw a lot more of them. I tried to draw them very quickly so my brain didn't have a chance to over-think what they were "supposed" to look like.

This exercise made me think of Matisse because he has this exceptional ability to convey a form or gesture with just the minimum amount of information. His drawings, paintings and sculptures exude emotion, tone, energy, and form, but have very few lines. He doesn't use shading to convey form, just contour, and even his color palette is extremely simplified. Here is one of my favorite compositions of his, maybe it will illustrate it better:

Henri Matisse- The Dance

I could stare at this painting all day.