Hands

Hands drawn on the iPad with Adobe Fresco and Clip Studio Paint plus one in regular pen and ink and watercolour.

Old Hand

hands

I have to admit that I’ve cheated, these iPad drawings are both of my left hand but I flipped the hand holding the pen horizontally in Photoshop.

Drawn with an Apple Pencil in Clip Studio Paint using the ‘Textured pen’ and ‘Watery ink’ brush. I had the iPad fixed on my Sketchboard Pro drawing board.

Waiting Room Sketches

watch and fasteningshandWe’ve got an appointment at the doctors’ this morning. As a change from drawing my hand, I start drawing the clasps and fastenings on my art bag and the back of my watch, which is the type that recharges its battery kinetically.

We’re back again in the afternoon. This time I revert to drawing my hand. I prefer drawing something organic to something mechanical.

White Rose Centre

hand handI’ve drawn my hands a couple of times waiting by the changing rooms in one of the stores in the White Rose shopping centre, Leeds, but just as I start sketching the shoppers – by trying to take a mental snapshot as they walk away – Barbara gets fitted up and we head off to find a likely place for lunch.

shoppers

Hands at the Hairdresser’s

handhandsWaiting for a haircut gives a chance to settle down and draw, which isn’t something that I’ve much chance to do on the run up to Christmas, a week from today.

gull and birch

The Waiting Game

handsTwo hours is a long time to spend in a waiting room but on the other hand . . . this is the most time that I’ve had for a sketching session for months. That is, sketching as opposed to sitting at my desk working on a comic strip. I have done plenty of that.

handsMy habit of drawing my hand when there’s nothing more inspiring to draw (or when it seems socially unacceptable to gawp at people, as in this waiting room) paid off when I was drawing my comic strip. It wasn’t easy to draw all those hands but at least alarm bells would ring if I drew something that didn’t look quite right, for instance the time when I was so wrapped up in my drawing that I drew a hand with one thumb and five fingers!

Capital at the Casbah

casbah pillarI did manage to get out for a brunch break and headed for the Cafe Casbah where I had time, after demolishing the eggs Benedict, to draw the cast iron capital of one of the pillars in the Redbrick Mill.

Link: Cafe Casbah, Redbrick Mill, Batley

The Fight with Poachers

fight with poachersI’m acting as fight arranger this morning. As I pencil and then start inking the fight with poachers page I’m ironing out some of the inconsistencies in my roughs, always with clarity in telling the story as my main consideration.

handfightFor instance in my first version of the frame in which Waterton forces the poacher to drop the knife, I realised that the knife was falling the wrong way, as if the poacher had been holding it upside down.

Manga Now!

Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts.
Manga Now! by Keith Sparrow and The Big Painting Challenge by Rosa Roberts. Wish that I had time to go through the tutorials in both these books but at least they can give me a few tips for aspects of my comic strip.

I’ve always been sceptical of those ‘how to draw super-heroes’ books but in drawing this fight scene I can see the need for some kind of a system for getting dynamic figures convincingly onto paper. It’s more like choreography than life drawing. I’ve drawn my hand hundreds of times but always in a relaxed position.

I like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it's not much use as reference for my comic strip.
I like this scribbly attempt to draw my hand in the right position as a drawing but it’s not much use as reference for my comic strip.

I tried one of Keith Sparrow’s suggestions in Manga Now! and put a small mirror on the desk to check out the outspread hand for the poacher dropping the knife but I couldn’t get my hand into the correct perspective nor could I hold the pose in the twisted outstretched position (too many cups of tea at breakfast time, as usual!)  and nor could I effectively sketch it single handed. Another problem is that my fingers are long so my hands don’t have the proportions that I need for my powerfully built poacher character.

I’d struggle in a similar way if I tried to take a photograph my hand so I’m concluding that building up the hand in simple block form (above), another suggestion in Keith Sparrow’s Manga Now!, is going to be the best way for me to get the dynamic hands in this story doing exactly what I want them to.

Link; Keith Sparrow author of  Manga Now! How to Draw Action Figures

Hand Coloured

hand in watercolourWith so many hands to draw for my Waterton comic, I might as well get a bit of practice in while I wait at the hairdressers.

I like the flat colour and confident line used in many comic strips, for example in the Adventures of Tintin, but my wiry pen drawing is better suited to watercolour.

A flat flesh colour wouldn’t give a true impression of the back of my hand which has yellowish and reddish patches plus a variety of browns and warm greys in the shadows. It looks lived in. Using pen and watercolour runs the risk of overloading the comic strip with visual information but I think it’s worth trying to make it work. My section of the story is set in a wildlife sanctuary so watercolour going to work well for the colours and texture of the natural world. In his autobiography, Waterton describes himself as looking as if he has spent his life out of doors in all weathers, so he needs to look like a part of the natural world too.

Hands and High Street

High Street
handI’m feeling relaxed enough, as we wait for our bagels in the Caffé Capri, to draw a high-speed sketch of the view up Horbury High Street. After all, if it doesn’t turn out to be precisely in the correct perspective, what does it matter? It’s not like me to say that, is it?!

handNo vase of flowers to draw in the hairdressers today, so it’s back to hands.

Hands, yes my perennial subject but not a bad one to mug up on with my Waterton comic strip project looming. Twelve pages, eight frames per page, and average of, say two people in each frame, that’s 12 x 8 x 2 figures, about 192 figures, each with two hands so that could be a total of 384 hands to draw!

I need to keep practicing.