Hand gesture class question

Hi )
First, thank you very much for this great resource. I've suddenly felt itch to draw at the age of 45 and this site helped me to improve my figure drawing skills with amazing speed. So....now i'm struggling with hands )) A question: in hand gesture class, what am i supposed to draw within 30 seconds ( it seems it should be something like direction lines in figure class, but there is no example, so i have no idea how it should start )
Thanks in advance )

Hi Mifata! So glad you are enjoying these tools. :) Examples of what short hand/feet gestures could look like is definitely something I'd like to add to our article library in the very near future, as you are not alone at all in wondering how to do short gestures with hands.

Here's what I told someone else just the other day in another thread, who had a similar dilemma:

If what you have is 30 seconds to work with, try to get down a single line at first, that captures the main motion of the hand. If you have more time left, maybe try to capture the angle of the palm to the wrist, the index finger to the pointer finger, all with single strokes. You will never be able to capture more detail or shading at this pace, so don’t worry about it. Your mission is much simpler. Let your mind take in not the details of what you’re seeing, but how the whole of the hand works together to make an impression of grace or tension or anger or striving. You can see this in a split second impression, without have to study the details of shadow or wrinkles in skin.

If you have 60 seconds to work with, you might aim to take down a shape of some kind for the palm – a rectangle, a triangle, whatever seems to work best for the angle you’re seeing the hand at – and five lines that capture the basic relationship of the fingers to that palm shape.

If you have a whopping 120 seconds available to you, you might do what you did for the 60 seconds, but this time, put down circles to indicate where the joints are in the fingers. You might even be able to render one or two of the fingers as three different lines, capturing the subtle or sharp changes of angle where those joints you’ve identified are.

In this way, you will start to train your brain to see the lines of motion (often referred to as the lines of action) in a pose or in a hand that give it feeling or interest, start to teach it to see the pieces of the body individually, and how they seem to change shape when rotated in space, and how the joints are placed in the skeleton to articulate different poses.

Carry these lessons forward with you into longer poses, where you can spend time working on getting the details right, and you will find that you gradually have a much clearer understanding of what you’re looking at. The class modes that work you through those shorter foundation exercises/warm ups and into longer poses are great for this!

Hope this helps! :D

Oh, thanks, this will help! I was trying to sketch a hand like crazy within 30 seconds )) And sometimes it is 2-4 wrists in the picture :)

Yes, those can be especially challenging! If you have too many hands in the picture and only 30 seconds and you feel it would be too much to do a two line (arm and hand) gesture for each, feel free to pick just one of the hands for now. There's nothing saying you have to include every single hand in the frame! So long as you are challenging yourself enough to grow (which will mean being frustrated and failing about half the time), but not so much that you are frustrated and unable to move forward, you're in a good place for learning.