{"id":4159,"date":"2025-05-02T10:56:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=4159"},"modified":"2025-05-01T15:10:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T19:10:16","slug":"sketch-of-the-week-reach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2025\/05\/sketch-of-the-week-reach\/","title":{"rendered":"Our reach exceeds our grasp (Sketch of the Week for Week 17 of 2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Folks often complain about drawing hands\u2014<em>hands are hard!<\/em> And they are 100% right: <strong>Hands are hard to draw<\/strong>. The one unalloyed good that has come from the advent of generative AI is that it&#8217;s objectively <em>confirmed<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But hands are sort of awesome models. I&#8217;ve probably drawn more left hands than anything else in my life, because I&#8217;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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, even with decades of drawing hands, they&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/IMG_3136.jpeg\" alt=\"A pencil sketch of a left hand reaching up out of the gloom.\" class=\"wp-image-4160\" width=\"424\" height=\"497\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/IMG_3136.jpeg 565w, https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/IMG_3136-256x300.jpeg 256w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 424px) 85vw, 424px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Folks often complain about drawing hands\u2014hands 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&#8217;s objectively confirmed that hands are really hard to get right: we used supercomputers to capture, encode, digest, and average all human &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2025\/05\/sketch-of-the-week-reach\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Our reach exceeds our grasp (Sketch of the Week for Week 17 of 2025)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[1021,1022],"tags":[113,1026,1104,904,572,1025,1024],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/a2mi.social\/@dave0\/114438816734134355","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4159"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4161,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4159\/revisions\/4161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}