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Wow, huge improvement right away! I don't see a single six fingered hand, and the one in the middle right of this page that's holding a rod or some straight object stands out as a landmark in your beginning to understand how to see and record finger anatomy: http://joshuamatulin.deviantart.com/art/30-Second-Hands-Day-313-Learning-to-Draw-646411423

You seem to be on the right path. I would say hold this course for a few weeks and compare the differences before setting new goals. One thing to try during this period would be trying to measure the hand against itself. For example, how many thumb lengths are in each finger at the particular angle you're seeing? This may help you to start getting more realistically proportioned hands. Here's a video on measuring the human body against itself: https://line-of-action.com/measuring-human-against-itself/ It's meant for figure drawing rather than hand drawing, but many of the same concepts apply.

At this stage of your practice, I would say put the pen away and work in pencil entirely. You'll probably be doing a lot of erasing, and that is good, because it means you are taking in more information and figuring out how to apply it to the page.

You may also want to do a few weeks of this exercise simultaneously with your hand practice: https://line-of-action.com/master-pencil/

It will help you to do your initial underdrawing (with the basic lines and shapes) veeery lightly, the next phase of putting in detail a little darker, and the final phase of finalizing your lines and adding shading even darker.

I'd also like to add: Work in pencil rather than pen! When you find yourself confronted with a full 5 or 10 minutes to draw, start by drawing those basic strokes that capture the angles, and the shape of the palm. Look at what you got, look at the image, use your eraser to make a few quick corrections, and then draw your details right on top of that basic framework. Stuff will relate to each other much better if you've got a little map to work with before getting detailed.

HI Joshua,

I think you may have unrealistic expectations of the goal of 30 second, 60 second, or even 120 second drawings -- very few people on the planet are able to produce "nice to look at" or even "accurate" drawings of something so complex as a hand or a human form in such a short period of time. And the goal, especially at this point in your practice, is not to make a finished piece. Indeed, if you keep thinking that you should be able to, you are setting yourself up to be frustrated and feel like a failure, and probably to give up before you make progress.

Let me reassure you: Your 2 minute -or shorter- drawings can and should look like total garbage, and can still provide a learning benefit to you!

One of the biggest mistakes that artists fall prey to is this feeling that they need to jump from a blank page to a beautiful artwork right away, when in fact, many stages of drawing don't look like much. Often, you may spend 10 minutes getting one part of the body totally captured and shaded, and then 10 minutes on another part, and then realize that while each individual piece is good they are at the wrong angle to each other, or badly out of proportion, etc. I can see in the drawings you've posted that you are ending up with extra fingers, which is exactly this problem of getting sucked into trying to render the details without first understanding how those pieces fit into the larger whole.

So in that sense, the super short, frustrating exercises you're struggling with are exactly the ones you need to be doing. They exist to train your brain NOT to get sucked into the amazing details, because you simply don't have time. Instead, you have to shift your priority to finding a way to capture the whole of the pose or the hand without any details first. I'll do my best to give you some suggestions for how you can begin to do that.

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!

In looking at the pieces you've posted, it looks like you are currently paying attention mostly or only to the outer edges of the things you're looking at, but not putting much attention toward what is going on INSIDE the hand (skeleton, muscles, flesh) to create those silhouettes in space. I'd encourage you to spend a month trying to sketch the bones and joints in a hand (you can represent them with lines and circles, no need to draw actual bones!) before you go back to drawing the visible flesh bits. You will come away with a much more powerful understanding of how hands work and are assembled.

Hope this helps!

What an excellent start and an ambitious goal! I commend you heartily. :)

My advice would be to pick a goal that is much more specific than "improve as much as possible." This is a very fuzzy and hard to measure goal, and doesn't give your brain much to focus on.

A more specific goal might be, "Use a wider range of pencil values for rendering" or "gain a deep understanding of all the joints in the toes"

You could have different goals per day, but make sure it's not as nebulous as "improve" or "improve at drawing"

Often, when you have finished your daily practice, you will review at the end and think, I really struggled with X aspect of this, or I'm not satisfied with X part of these drawings. Rephrase whatever that was as a goal, write it on a post it note, and stick it on your monitor for the next day's practice! :)

I would suggest starting with the 30 minute class mode and drawing what you see, with a specific goal like "Today, I will just try to focus on the way that legs fit into hip sockets in the real world."

Then, follow with 10 - 15 minutes of drawing without a reference, trying to remember what you learned during your study from real photos. Repeat every day or every other day!

2 to 6 hours is an unrealistic amount of practice time for anyone who isn’t paid to practice. Even many college students studying fine art don’t get that much practice on a truly daily basis.

Make sure you’re putting in 15 minutes of focused practice every single day. By focused practice, I mean always have a specific goal in mind before you put pencil to paper, as detailed in this article: https://line-of-action.com/focused-practice-an-exercise-for-real-improvement-in-33-days/

15 minutes per day will at least keep your brain focused on the task of making new and better connections regarding these skills.

Then, add in a few days in the week when you will do longer practices; 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, whatever is realistic.

Unfortunately, your links don’t work for me so I can’t give more specific feedback, but I wanted to provide some comfort that meaningful progress IS possible without needing to devote your entire life to improving.

I don't know of one, but we'd like to add one ourselves in the relatively near future. We've been slowly banking images for quite some time!

Okay, so it was *late* 2016, but the wait is over! This feature has arrived, you can now pick any number of seconds to see each image. :)

We're actually experimenting with a new setup that might make custom times possible, both in regular mode and in class mode. So fingers crossed, early 2016. :)

Awesome, thank you so much for contributing these! :D

Aww, thanks for saying! :) That makes me very happy.

That's a huge step up!

One thing I notice is that you are drawing the torso as a shape that goes from shoulder to hips in about 90% of these drawings. I would encourage you as you continue practicing to work on recording JUST the rib cabe -- that might mean a second shape within your "full" torso shape, or it might mean replacing the current torso shape with a just-ribcage shape. Either is fine, so long as you are training yourself to find the ribs.

The reason I recommend this is that there are these two major structures in the trunk of the body, the hipbones and the ribcage, and they are inflexible. You can rotate them all over the place and see them in different positions and angles, but in reality they don't change that much. But then there's this super important several inches that separates ribcage and hipbones where there are no wrap-around bones. This area is quite flexible and changes shape constantly as the tilt of hips or chest changes, bringing the two major bone structures closer or further apart.

Knowing where the ribcage actually begins and ends and where the more squishy bits live can help oodles in composing very dynamic and active poses, and held you understand how to more realistically shade your figures.

Keep it up! :)

Hi John!

There's some articles on how to use the 30 second window to practice basic concepts here:

https://line-of-action.com/gesture-basics-1-line-of-action/
https://line-of-action.com/gesture-basics-2-torso-and-hips/
https://line-of-action.com/gesture-basics-3-joints/

Also, see my recent rant here on why you're probably doing just fine in that 30 seconds even if all you produce is a scribble: https://line-of-action.com/forums/topic/can-i-get-some-advice-for-figures/#post-4899

Hope these help. :)

Love it, Yarnick! I can definitely tell who each of the models you were rendering were.

Here's mine so far:

Thank you so much for the recommendations, Simon! Looking forward to checking those out. :)