Hand in colored pencil

I've tried switching things up a bit with this sketch. I used a watercolor pencil (Faber-Castell's Albrecht Dürer in Venetian Red). I also borrowed a bit of hatching around the hand from my good friend Leonardo da Vinci. He really deserves more recognition as his work is pretty solid.

Kidding aside... I've worked from the illustrations in Giovanni Civardi's Complete Guide to Drawing, the section of that book is contained in his volume Drawing Hands and Feet if you're looking for an available copy to help work on your own illustrations.

Beginning the Process
I began this drawing with some very light 2H graphite pencil to establish the basic form of the hand. It took probably more than half of the total drawing time to get this right which is pretty typical for me when focusing on making an accurate drawing. I can't stress the importance of getting this stage right from the beginning. It doesn't matter how good your technical skills are if your proportions are off -- viewers have a lifetime of experience with proper proportions even though most of us probably couldn't articulate what seems wrong without close inspection. I still made a few errors but you'll have to find them yourself if you're interested but one clue is that it has to do with proportions (unsurprisingly). I didn't actually measure any of the proportions which I would definitely do on a more serious effort.

Once I had the rough proportions, I created a clean outline of the entire hand and fingers with an F grade clutch pencil lightly drawn. I then drew over this line with the colored pencil and then began the shading process.

Shading
Shading is basically done by following the undulations of the skin but there was no rigid rule followed here. The key for me is to start lightly and really focus on the 3-dimensional form I am trying to portray. The darker the colored pencil becomes, the more it has a tendency to blob up on the page, meaning it begins clumping together and smearing. This is when having a very sharp pencil makes a huge difference. Try to avoid just smudging your darks, work in layers and employ cross-hatching instead.

At the end, I ended up outlining the hand with some 6B and 2B graphite pencil just to provide a solid outline and a more concrete idea of the form. I'm not sure it was necessary but I seemed to like the overall image better after doing this.

The colored pencil effect has an immediate appeal which might result in me working more in this medium. I've been interested in trying my hand at some life drawing, so this might be a nice medium for that application as well.

I'll definitely be working in colored pencil when I turn to full body studies on toned paper along with charcoal pencil and vine charcoal.

Pelvis illustration

Turning my sketchbook to the human pelvis today. It's quite an interesting and complex bit of architecture; quite the feat of natural selection in how it pivoted and morphed from the more horizontal primate-style structure designed for knuckle-walking to the upright construction in the early bipedal hominids. The angles the spine creates in the lower back as a result of this design continue to produce back strain even today after over 4 million years of evolution (as I can attest to after my trips to the chiropractor earlier this year).

I included a copy of the illustration with labels as it might appear in an anatomy guide. This is obviously a huge tip of the hat to Stephen Rogers Peck's Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist.

The Eyes Have It (or at least they should)

Drawing eyes realistically can be a finicky business. A drawing can succeed or fail based on how well the artist captures the reality of the eyes. I spend a lot of time sketching eyes and dedicated a page of my sketchbook to working on some of the exercises in Giovanni Civardi's Complete Guide to Drawing which I discussed in my previous post.

Eyes aren't really that difficult, there's simply a lot going on with their construction. First, you have the round iris and pupil at center stage, but the shading on each is handled differently: the pupil is treated as flat whereas the iris can be treated as an inverted bowl. The fleshly parts around the eye have lots of nooks and crannies and here is where an excellent anatomy book can help tease out the various parts.

The mini-tutorial above shows the steps I've followed in creating the eyes in my sketchbook. None of the sketches are perfect (the irises aren't round, the symmetry is off, there are details overemphasized or underemphasized), but the main point is that practice makes perfect. The more you sketch something, the better able you are to recall those details when you draw it later.

I find eyes very satisfying to sketch. They're a good challenge and help keep your technical skills honed. I would highly recommend Giovanni Civardi's book Drawing Portraits to get you on your way to understanding the anatomy more clearly.