Life Drawing Session - Focus on Hands

In this session with Will we spent the first hour focusing on how to capture hands correctly, so he asked the model to pose for a series of exaggerated (in some cases) hand gestures to test our skills.

Will mentioned that in order to avoid the fingers turning out like sausages, we need to consider every joint and ligament in the hand as an angle, and to join these angles accordingly. This is why in some of my pictures the hands seem quite rigid.

Another good tip, was to make sure that if we drew on fingernails, that they should be subtle, and not completely outlined - otherwise it gives the impression of them being 'stuck on'. The fingernail should also always be set in lower than the flesh of the finger - so show the real shape of the hand.

The photos below, are of the 1hr 45min drawing of our life model. The challenge for this piece was to accurately foreshorten the body and arms, at the odd angle that I was looking at her - without it all looking the wrong size. I spent a lot of time measuring and adjusting size and widths. I especially found the proportion of the chest area tricky. On reflection, the thing which stands out for me is her left calf muscle. The wall that the model was balancing her legs on was white -and so I cannot show that her legs are pressed against a surface very well. Her calf muscle looks slightly too large because it was pressed against the wall - thus pushing her muscle mass out horizontally. Next time I will look into was I can show that she is leaning against a surface, even when that surface has no defining features!