500 Hands Challenge: Done!

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I finished the 500 Hands Challenge a bit early, and it feels very good to be done. In this post, I'm going to talk about what I learned.

If you're curious about the origin of this hand challenge, click on this link for my first post about it:

The 500 Hands Challenge

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I don't like to start on page one of a new sketchbook. This shows the first 4 hands I drew on a random page for the challenge, then I continued them on page one of the sketchbook. I also realized that I used number 44 twice, so I guess I drew 501 hands.

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Probably one of the most important things I learned was that it's crucial to draw the gesture of the hand first, then refine it. It makes the whole process easier, and results in a higher quality, more lively hand every time. The best hands always start with a gesture.

I've never loved sight drawing (otherwise known as Drawing from Life). Thus it's not been my strong suit. But this challenge resulted in me getting better at sight drawing, proportion, and just plain looking.

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At a about 250 hands, I was sick to death of them. I was complaining one evening, and a fellow illustrator said "To get better at drawing something (like hands) develop a fetish for them; fall in love with them. Fall in love with the curves, the structure, the nuances. Every time you draw a hand, be in love with it." So I took his advice. It made all the difference, and I wasn't bored afterwards.

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What else did I learn? That all the great artists did not draw great hands all the time. While I fell in love with Michaelangelo's fat, blocky hands, and continued my infatuation with the skinny, sinewy hands of Arthur Rackham, I found weirdly lumpy, potato-hands that Michaelangelo and Rockwell fudged on, and a few pretty rough ones by Rackham too. I admit it, those discoveries made me feel better about my drawings.

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I admit too, that in the beginning I skipped drawing the more difficult hand positions, but at some point, I quit avoiding them without even knowing when.

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I also learned:

-Expressive hands are not always in proportion; proportionate hands are not always the most expressive

-If my copied hand looked too much like the resource, I found I hadn't learned as much. Somehow the act of being too responsible to the resource got in the way of my progress.

-All the great artists relied on  "stock" hand positions they found useful and thus drew over and over.

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Since the worst hands were the first hands, were the last few the best? Nope. By the end, I knew I had to get them done to make time for other things, so I rushed them a bit. But I did get faster and better at drawing hands overall, and that was really the point of the challenge.

And maybe the best thing?  By the 300th hand I found I did not hate drawing hands anymore. Hatred's root after all, is fear. Drawing 500 (and one) hands has pretty much erased my fear of them. I will always find drawing them difficult, but I know I'll continue to enjoy the challenge.

Thanks for reading!

Attacking Hands: The 500 Hands Challenge

Hands drive me crazy. I have always practiced them at intervals, but it hasn't been enough to get me where I want to be with them. Wanting to be better (and faster) at drawing them led to a conversation with some fellow illustrators. One fellow proposed the "500 Hands Challenge". The timeline: Beginning June 1, 2015 and ending October 1, 2015. I accepted.

Here are my tentative and awkward first three.  Realizing I was needing more of a plan than just randomly drawing a few hands a day, I came up with the following outline:

June: Copy other artist's hands to learn by studying the masters

July: Continue copying, adding emphasis on gesture along with the study of hand anatomy

August: "Deliberate Practice" using Stan Prokopenko's method of the same name; 

1. Make a mistake

2. Analyze it, imagining what it should look like

3. Re-draw and fix it until it is right 

Watch the video here:

Proko's Practice

September: Apply all the above, but draw every hand from imagination

Here's an early page of hands drawn from those of Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Rackham, and W. Heath Robinson.

And a more recent set from Vilppu and Bridgman. Jumping the gun a bit where anatomy is concerned, too.

After more conversations with the instigator of this challenge, I realized that the gesture piece needed to be put in place early on. His recommendation to check out the Vilppu methods was helpful--the Vilppu manual Drawing Hands and Feet is amazing! 

Find the book here:

Vilppu's Hands and Feet book

This week a few of us are meeting over a beer to discuss our progress, and most of all to share what we know and have discovered in this first month of the challenge.

I'm a fifth of the way into it, and yes, this is pretty much killing me. Finding it very difficult to cram in concentrated hand studies along with my workload, but it's past time to do it--I need to do it.

Wish me luck and thanks for checking out the post!