Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Anonymous asked: how did you learn to draw hands?

okay I’ve had a lot of people asking this one and for hand tutorials and, well, I’m not much good at tutorials and I didn’t learn to draw them from a tutorial so it would feel a bit silly to make one tbh but this is the honest to god truth you can ask my mother she was witness to it and thought I was nuts because I spent two weeks over a summer holiday drawing nothing but hands every day

that’s… it

seriously

two weeks of nothing but hands

my parents are both doctors so we had various anatomy/dissection books scattered about the place and I knew I sucked at drawing hands but I wanted to be able to really badly, so I grabbed a bunch and sat and did studies of the skeletal structure, muscles, nerves, you name it. Really bad ones. Over and over and over, and even after that I wasn’t fab at drawing hands by any stretch but it helped me understand what they’re made of and how they work as mechanical objects- I mean god I know about the blood vessels in hands and I’ve never had to use that information practically but hell is it interesting to me.

The next step was just observing people and their hands (including myself, lots of drawings of my own left hand in my sketchbooks lemme tell u), and getting the body language down. You can’t draw a real thing purely from a dissected thing- take George Stubbs, fantastic horse artist, knew the anatomy literally inside out but some of the paintings he did just look kind of… wrong. Why? Because they look like a puppet of a horse that’s been meticulously arranged, that’s why. It is anatomically perfect, but not alive. You have to look at the living thing and how it moves and behaves to be able to draw it as a living thing. One thing I learned was that body language- especially in the world of hands- can be extremely personal as well as universal, so observe as much as you can in as many places as you can!

so yeah sorry it’s a very boring waffling answer but in summary I just kind of sat down and studied hands for a single ungodly length of time and kept going as a habit ever after. There are probably much better saner ways of doing it and I’m by no means an expert at drawing them- I’m still learning all the time! Try to find the way that’s right for you, there’s lots of cool guides out there, but in all honesty you’re only going to learn how to draw something by looking at the real deal and trying to figure out how it works, so go look!

Interesting question- although I debate calling me clever- but yes, I have bad dreams very frequently. I actually wouldn’t call them ‘bad’, so much as 'extraordinarily weird and in retrospect not very nice at all and rather messed up’, but that takes a long time to write so 'bad’ will suffice.

I actually keep a journal of all my most interesting/inspiring dreams, and often as not the ones I remember are the worst ones. One that I really hope I never have again but which was very interesting was the night that I got stuck in a tree. Doesn’t sound that bad, does it? However, you have to account for the fact that I had been to see The Tempest a few nights before, and in the story Ariel (the air nymph, not the mermaid) is contained in a tree for years by an evil enchantress. My brain does not process this in the usual 'oh he gets locked up big deal’ fashion, oh no. I don’t know if I was ill or just particularly hopped up on Shakespeare but the dream was not a good one.

It was nothing short of a full, night-long experience of my lungs splintering every time I took a breath, my veins and arteries being clotted with sap while their walls stiffen out like xylem and phloem, to say nothing of the sensation of my toes extending and softening into damp white roots and my entire nervous system branching out through hundreds of leaves, which were chewed by insects and torn off by birds and ripped away by gales. Eventually I developed a bad case of rot halfway down what had been my shins, which was just about the most unpleasant thing in the whole situation; having this patch of disease just eating away at me without at rhyme or reason and with no means of doing anything about it. I think it ended when some guys with chainsaws showed up to cut me down but I woke up before it got too out of hand.

… That one sentence was far too long but you get the gist.

It wasn’t fun.