Week 11

The Hand!

The hand is a very intricate part of the body because there are so many bones.  I think the hand is a difficult area to draw because it is so familiar to the eye you can tell if it looks off.  There are so many different planes and joints that there is a lot of places where you can go wrong.

In class we broke it up to draw the skeleton hand for the half the time and the human hand for the other half.  I chose to start with the skeleton hand in hopes it would get me a better feel for the inside before I drew the outside.  It was interesting to see how irregular the phalange bones are and how narrow the end bone gets.

The proper way to attempt to draw a hand is to start with the body of the hand (the curve), then find the planes, the long axis line of each finger, then the thumb, and finally add detail.  To avoid sausage fingers exaggerate the wide, narrow, wide.  The bones in the hand largely resemble the bones in the foot.  The carpal bones make up the palm and have an arch to them.  The metacarpals, again, are box, rod, and ball.  Another major problem that most people have is not connecting the thumb to the wrist because it is visually deceiving to start off the palm.  I found it interesting the curve that can be made through the same joints of all the fingers to visually make a semi-circle kind of a form.

I drew two different real life hand poses and I think the more irregular posed hand turned out more successful because I actually had to concentrate on what I saw and how the fingers were interacting..  In the other pose, where it was just a plain hand, I think our brain just draws what we think we see rather than what is really there and that is something I need to strive to get accurate.  Other things I worked on were correcting the thumb and not making it so bally at the end and also curving fingernails around the finger.