Hand studies

As I know I have mentioned elsewhere on this site, I try to spend at least some time every day in art practice. Having done a lot of figure studies and portraits recently, I thought it might be good to commit some time to practicing drawing hands.

Now I think that in some ways, drawing hands is a bit like drawing faces, in that you don’t have to be an artistic genius to see if they’ve come out wrong. This is both a good thing and a bad. On the bad side, if you are a little bit lacking in self-confidence, it would be easy to get discouraged by early failure. On the plus side, it does force you to LOOK properly and helps train your brain and body to coordinate your movement.

These hands are drawn with Conté carres on newsprint paper. Conté carres are like a kind of hard pastel made by compressing natural pigments in a clay binder. Newsprint paper is cost-effective if you want to have a cheap sketch pad to practice on without having to worry too much about the cost; I strongly recommend getting hold of some and just DRAWING.

The rest of the sketches I made are in my Drawings section.

Hand study