Tip #1: Throw Away Your Vocabulary

A much more dedicated artist than me once said that “drawing is the art of seeing.” It was during a class lecture that we were imparted this wisdom in order to better help us draw our subject matter more true to life. Nowhere can this advice help more than with drawing hands.

Hands are very complex mechanisms, but their structure alone is not what makes them difficult to draw. We speak with our hands and use them for tasks throughout every day of our lives. Because of this, we are constantly looking at our own and other people’s hands. This creates a sense of familiarity. The more time you spend with something, the more you develop emotional attachments to it and less critical analysis of it.

So when we slow down and begin to look closely enough at hands to put their likeness to paper, we can become disgusted and confused by all the shapes and intricate details that begin to surface in our artistic interpretation of them. Most people have a preconceived notion of what a “hand” should look like, how it’s “fingers” should rest, and how the “wrist” should bend. So the key to really seeing a hand and drawing it accurately is to completely forget these terms when drawing them.

When fingers simply become a system of linked tubes and a wrist becomes just an elongated box, we begin to see the root structure of the object we’re drawing. In letting go of these preconceived notions of what something should look like, we begin to draw the things we see as they actually are.

Thanks for checking out my work! More sketchbook pages and drawing tips are coming soon. So, let me know what you guys think or if there’s any specific topic you would like me to cover, tips you want disclosed, or general drawing/sketching questions you think I might be able to answer.

Until next time!

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