Nuki News #49 - An Artist's Enemy- Hands!

Hands!! The artists’ great foe. At times, when I get tunneled into drawing for others, eventually I start seeing patterns or flaws in my work, areas to improve on. This is natural and a good thing for any artist to start seeing these weak spots. Initially, it was just structure in my drawings I wasn’t as happy with. But up came this video by Marco Bucci, on hands!

https://youtu.be/XBMQ-H-qUVk

A problem I saw with my own work was I had been sloppy with my depictions of hands. Before seeing the video, I was just planning on doing my default- just throw myself at practicing general structure on character bodies, etc. But with this video, I knew I could do better by focusing on one subject- hands! So I went through the video multiple times, and every day I did one section at a time. There’s something more powerful about taking learning more gradually- with full focus and intent, mind you. But you can tell each part has a different focus, and on the 5th day it all comes together pretty nicely!

Day 1 - Planes

 Day 2 - Wrist/Palms

 Day 3 - The Thumb and fingers

 Day 4 - The Fingers and gesture

 Day 5 - Hand Poses

From doing this I did solidify the structure of hands in my head much better. Understanding how the palms and wrists work being the biggest takeaways. I’m still iffy on fingers, but I can grasp where they start better.

I wanted to write about this as a reminder that studying is valuable,(as if anyone says it isn’t, regardless of subject matter). But often we don’t get to see how studying is progressing us or our knowledge. Fortunately with art you can see that progress, which is part of why it was so rewarding for me to pursue.

Some missed opportunities were continuing the practice longer than just 5 days- I can only imagine how much better I’d be if I dedicated 30 minutes to an hour doing this all month, ahah. But I’ve always been like this, falling off the horse after a week usually. I have been thinking about doing art streams where I do practice stuff more, maybe record them too! There’s some simpler drawing exercises I think would be great to bring people into.

What do you think, would you be interested in seeing me do posts on practice stuff more?