perhaps a silly ask but you are so good at drawing hands and feet, and they (feet especially) continue to elude me. do you have any tips for breaking those fuckers into manageable shapes/refs you recommend?
aww, thank you typhros!
my forever ever number one tip is using references, and more often than not i photograph my own hands (and feet!) to get the exact posing and angle i need. the downside of using only your own body as a reference is the risk of ending up drawing bodies that all look the same, and i do my best to counteract that by studying pictures of other people! just, anywhere and everywhere. i save quite a few pictures to my ref folders with thoughts of ‘oh yes, these particular hands have this particular feature that i want to give this particular character when i draw them’. then i can use my own hands as a pose reference, but give different characters their own unique hands.
(teeny tiny tip related to the above: imo a very fast and easy way to diversify your hands is to give your characters differently shaped nails. and i don’t only mean differently shaped nail tips, but the nail beds specifically! it’s amazing how diverse nails can be, no one in my family has the same nail shape. : D that being said, nails are not the only thing you can play with: hands can have different amounts of fat on them, veins that are or are not prominent, thin or thick skin that influences the color, various degrees of being manicured or not, all sorts of marks such as freckles/moles/scars/hangnails/tattoos, and tons of other stuff.)
the legendary @ adorkastock here on tumblr has two whole books of nothing but hand and feet references (which i regrettably do not own but hear are great), and i also highly recommend @ subwayhands over on instagram for random hand enrichment. simply a great collection of photography (done by Hannah La Follette Ryan) if you want to study what human hands look like.
as for how to break hands and feet down into manageable shapes: a lot of great tutorials have been done on the subject and i don’t think i’ll be able to recommend anything particularly nifty when it comes to the building blocks, but i can recommend drawing the outer shape of hands and feet first, especially when you’re working from a reference! and only then start filling it in with details.
this will help you not get lost in the minutiae of fingers and folds of skin and instead allow you to reliably capture the proportions and movement.
hope this is helpful! happy hand and feet drawing 🤞
Is there a magic secret I never learned in all the art classes I've taken? How do you pick the colors you use??? I'm in love with all your choices. Like the little bits of color that don't match what color it's near... how do you decide where the color goes? Is it like the shadows and highlights? Your color palettes are gorgeous. Your art is so beautiful.
thank you!
there is no magic secret! it is all about how you choose to interpret the color you see—i.e., your personal stylization.
look at this wonderful picture of fuji apples:
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(By Scott Bauer, USDA ARS, Public Domain)
the local color of the fuji apples above is red, and they’re lit and photographed in a way that makes them appear pretty uniformly red in hue as well. but you can still pick up some small variations in hue, as well as saturation (chroma) and value!
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you can go the hyper-realistic route, carefully observing and replicating the colors you see to create a painting of fuji apples that is as close to real life as possible. you can also choose to stylize and interpret the colors through a certain lens, which may help convey a certain mood or just make the image more aesthetically pleasing (humans usually enjoy limited palettes it seems).
there is an infinite number of ways you can do that! which is where the fun of experimenting and developing your own style lies. the important thing you need to remember is that, while i picked those little swatches with the eyedropper tool, you should observe and depict any color in relation to its neighbor and not on its own. is this patch cooler or warmer in hue in relation to its neighbor? is it more or less saturated? is it lighter or darker in color?
once you have analyzed those properties, you can think of how you want to stylize them. would you like to lean the darker shades red? would you like to make one object more saturated than everything else in the picture, to draw the viewer’s attention to it? would you like to make all the lighter colors lighter and all the darker colors darker in order to up the contrast of your painting? the possibilities are endless.
here’s my little 15 minute study!
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i made the background more green in hue because i wanted the apples to stand out more, pushed the highlights away from white and towards light green to make the color scheme more harmonious, and added purple to the shadows because that’s what i do. : ) among other things. it has changed both the mood and the lighting of the original photo! and you don’t have to follow this algorithm for everything, or indeed anything—you can play around with color any way you want.
you can do this kind of color nudging with color overlays in graphic software too, to a certain extent. for example, if you set a solid yellow layer to ‘darken color’ over a picture, it will turn all the pixels of that picture that are lighter in value than that particular yellow into that yellow. things like that can make your color palette more cohesive/limited, and doing those adjustments in your head as you paint (as opposed to on a separate layer) can make them look more varied and fun. no shame in color correction, use it! it’s a tool just like any traditional glaze is, and if you have a favorite 'glaze’, with practice you will figure out what it is you like about it and start incorporating that right at the painting stage.
tl;dr: observe the colors around you in relation to each other, experiment with them, and most importantly paint and practice a lot! thankfully there are no magical secrets, only color theory and practice 💪( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
for color theory reading, i recommend James Gurney’s Color and Light! it was recommended to me last year, and introduced me to the gamut map approach, which i hadn’t been familiar with before. i’ve only used it once but it was tremendous fun and taught me a couple new things.
