Tag: hands

“Don’t hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourself” ♬♫♪ (Sketches of the Week for Week 24 of 2025)

This was another split decision sketch week. I was actually mostly happy with every sketch this week (which is extremely rare) but also felt that each of them had unresolved issues, either with legibility or just minor composition decisions early in the sketch that ended up creating headaches.

At any rate, my son felt that these two were the best showing.

A loose pencil sketch of two hands looming out of the gloom
A pencil sketch of a saucy warrior

He really liked how the hands loomed out of the gloom, and the overall gesture in the second sketch. I really liked working on the first (the extremely foreshortened hands were both challenging but super engaging to work on) and the second is, as discussed in the past, an indisputable crowd-pleaser (saucy powerful ladies garner second glances and clicks—although, that aside, capturing the depth of the way she is sitting and the angled and occluded way the axe-hand-arm interact was really pleasingly challenging).

Final note: For ladies and gent of a certain age, the title of this post will trigger a potentially catastrophic earworm. To the rest of you, I offer a mostly forgotten one-hit wonder of my Cold War youth, the presumably ironically (???) named Georgia Satellites.

Our reach exceeds our grasp (Sketch of the Week for Week 17 of 2025)

Folks often complain about drawing hands—hands are hard! And they are 100% right: Hands are hard to draw. The one unalloyed good that has come from the advent of generative AI is that it’s objectively confirmed that hands are really hard to get right: we used supercomputers to capture, encode, digest, and average all human art ever, and even it consistently fucks up the hands. That is some poignant shit right there.

But hands are sort of awesome models. I’ve probably drawn more left hands than anything else in my life, because I’m right handed, which means there is one model I always have with me that can adopt as wide a range of poses as the entire human body. If you want to sketch and improve at sketching, your hand is an amazing model.

Anyway, even with decades of drawing hands, they’re still hard. A lot went wrong with this sketch as I worked it, but it ended up in the right place: it captures, to my satisfaction, something ineffable I was feeling about the human condition, and it does so in three square inches of pressed wood pulp and graphite, in a way that you can either grasp or ignore at a single glance.

A pencil sketch of a left hand reaching up out of the gloom.