hands session number 2

Hi Astronaut,

You've chosen quite a tricky subject for your drawing. Hands are one of the hardest things to draw in my opinion. You certainly don't back away from a challenge!

The first thing I would say is that your hands are very square and flat. Hands are much more curved and sometimes it's necessary to exaggerate those curves slightly or chose a pose that shows those curves more so we don't end up with hands that are flat and square.

It helps a lot to 'construct' the hand even if you are drawing from a reference. The curves and angles on the hand a very subtle in places and they can look wrong even with small errors.

My advice would be to learn more about how to construct the hand, understand the anatomy or even just the basic forms that make up the hand. There's a great video over on Proko.com that goes through the process in great detail. One thing I took away from that video is that drawing hands requires a lot of patience and careful work to get them to look right.

The other thing I would say is that some of the drawings are quite hard to make out. You've drawn lines over lines and in the end, it's not easy to make out the drawing. The centre hands, in particular, suffer from this. You need to work on varying your line weight. It helps to use a very dark pencil, and draw construction lines very light. They erase easily and later heavier lines are easily distinguished from the lighter construction lines.

And don't be afraid to get out the eraser and get rid of mistakes. You don't want to be constantly erasing lines, but if your drawing becomes a tangled mess of lines, then you really need to start removing some or starting over.

Well done, keep up the practice, and most importantly, keep looking for that feedback and you'll soon master it.

Best of luck!