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Day 41
Struggling with motivation and frustration in general this week – I blame the weather! Very late today, but to me the most important thing is still getting at least 15 minutes every day. Did 10x 1 minute hand gestures to warm up, then chose this one from the set to draw for longer.
Day 42
Been slow going on lessons, will hopefully pick back up on that tonight. Back to figures this morning!
- Contours of the torso ended up straighter than the gesture which lost the nice repeated S curve of the spine
- Hands – could make sense of her right hand although it doesn’t quite “feel” like it’s pressed into the ground and supporting her weight. Angle of the arm contributes to that, and hands should be flattened more in perspective. That along with her left hand – will need to find some references of hands w/ palms pressed into the ground
Day 43
After yesterday’s pose, I wanted to spend some time on hands that were flattened – or the medial / lateral views I’ve seen in a lot of poses. With so little of each separate finger visible (especially when the medium doesn’t support small details) they start to look just like straight sticks instead of bony fingers.
Day 47
Warmed up with some hand gestures and decided to draw this one. Thinking about simplifying to a few values, simple C or S curves for contours. Need to keep in mind the thickness of fingers – connections of these make them seem very narrow in some places.
Day 48
Thinking about overlaps, and another foreshortened hand in this pose.
This time I tried to draw the palm as a foreshortened flattened box first and then add the overlaps.
Day 49
Working on references with both hands to practice relating them to each other. Today I was interested in the overlap of the right hand in front of the left.
Day 50, halfway through!
At first I thought this was way too long to go through the hands lessons, but I’m still working through them (still on Steve Huston’s master studies). I haven’t been very diligent with lessons in the last couple weeks, so this daily practice is my lifeline to keeping things in memory. Will try to do better this next week!
50 days in, I feel a lot more comfortable with the anatomy and general structure of a hand. For the full body poses, even with reference sometimes it’s hard to tell how a hand is positioned. Focusing on just the hands has helped with imaging some of the missing details or just making sense of a lower-resolution / smaller reference. I’m also appreciating that even when drawing from observation, it helps to “edit” or reposition things so the idea is clearer.
I still don’t have a good control of rendering. E.g. for today’s pose, I’m getting better at observing shadows midtones and highlights, but I can’t render them very convincingly – especially midtones with the charcoal.
All told though it’s really satisfying to go back through this thread and think about the challenges each day!
Day 51
Not much to today – just drawing, taking a break from thinking critically.
Day 52
Oof, I tried this one four different times and I just could not get the proportions to look right. Tried starting from careful measurement and starting from a looser gesture, neither approach is working for me today. Oh well, moving on – I’ll stick this in the folder of poses I want to try again when I think I’ve gotten better. Here’s the last attempt from today:
Day 53
Left the charcoal pencil dull today and played with the softer / darker lines. This one was fun, a lot of gesture!
- Little off on the proportion of the index finger. Proximal phalanx should be longer
- Didn’t know how to get the texture of the hair on the arm
Hi, I would ignore texture/hair/detail in general. Just stick to focusing on the gesture and structure of things. 😉
Hey Marcolino! Thanks for the reminder 🙂 That had been my plan up front but it’s so easy to get distracted – will get back to it!
On Structure – I’d also planned not to focus on value for now, but I’ve found the drawings look really flat without any. Today I tried to stick to 3 values but I’m not great at consistent values.
Here’s day 54:
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