ONLINE ART COURSE – SKETCHING HANDS WITH COLOURED PENCILS
This is the second project in the coloured pencils module. We were given three pictures of hands to draw, and in the first instance we had to do this with a normal pencil. It was an exercise in getting the proportions correct. Phil, the teacher, said that there are many instructions around which calculate the length of the fingers compared with the thumb or the palm etc., but he said these formulae really only work if you are viewing a hand held straight up, and this is hardly a normal position to encounter when you want to draw hands! His approach was far less analytical and formulaic, and it reminded me of what Prof. Clara Lieu of ArtProf said when drawing faces – forget the forumulae and methods, and just draw what you see!
The first hand
A relatively simple pose.
We were instructed to draw this at the top left-hand corner of the page, in order to leave room for the other two hands, and not to make the drawing too complicated. No shading was involved, but it was all right to indicate where the shadows might be.
A detail shot.
Beginning with one particular landmark, in this case the thumbnail, and working outwards from that, consantly referring to the reference photo and judging the angles and distances of the different landmarks in the picture in relation to each other.
The second hand
A more complex pose with plenty of foreshortening to contend with. I have to confess to departing from the brief on this one as it was getting a bit complicated to see what was what, so I added quite a bit of shading with the pencil. I lived to regret this later…
A detail of this one.
The third hand
Hands are so expressive and the variety of different positions seems to be infinite!
A detail shot.
Monochrome shading
The second part of this project was to do some monochrome shading with the coloured pencils. We were to keep this very simple and sketchy. For the first hand, we used a dark blue coloured pencil, first of all mapping out just the very darkest shadow areas, and then on the second pass, adding the intermediate values. The highlights were the white of the paper.
This is where I realised my mistake in dong all that pencil shading, and I had to rub most of it out! A little did remain but it didn’t really matter; I had erased enough for the colored pencil to grip on the surface.
For the third hand, we used three different browns, beginning with the lightest and building up the shadowed areas with the intermediate and finally the darkest brown. Again we were instructed to keep this sketchy. This time I did not try and produce a beautifully blended surface but to try and follow Phil’s instructions. I didn’t do a lot of hatching lines because I didn’t really like the look of this with coloured pencils. I think this method of adding darker values is best reserved for ink pen work, but it’s all a matter of personal taste, really.
So far this has been a very interesting exercise. I do enjoy drawing hands, and drawing foreshortened objects is always a fun challenge and I love the results.
My previous hand drawings
Just to recap – here are a couple of drawings of hands that I did a while back. The first is one of Prof. Lieu’s references.
This one was done with Tombow Dual Brush Markers and was done as a rapid study.
The second one was done with ink pen and black watercolour wash, and was done from a screengrab on YouTube.
Making skin tones
The final lesson in this particular project was making swatches of different skin tones. Phil showed us the colours that one might automatically be drawn to in order to create realistic skin tones, but directed us away from these (different shades of brown only) and chose five, beginning with yellow and working down to dark brown.
We drew little swatches of these colours, and then made three different skin tone swatches. I wrote underneath each colour I used – this was all done with Faber Castell Polychromos.
The final step was to blend the colours with a layer of white pencil. Phil said that because the Polychromos are so hard, the white pencil from this brand was ideal for this as you could really push it into the paper to get rid of the white paper showing through. On the other hand, this particular white pencil isn’t very good for adding detail.
Comparing with Kirsty Partridge’s skin tones tutorial
Kirsty Partridge, in her YouTube tutorial, also used Polychromos and chose almost exactly the same range of colours as Phil did for the course. The only change was to use dark cadmium orange in place of deep scarlet red, and her approac was pretty much the same. In my swatch sheet, I also added similar colours found in the Amazon Basics range. I liked Kirsty’s “spheres” which gave the opportunity to practice highlights and shadows in the same image.
I am pleased to have been able to complete this fairly quick lesson, and I am now ready to move on to the main drawing of the project.
