Mentor Experiment: Week 5: Barry’s Critique

(Click the image above to embiggen.)

Barry’s work is continuing to improve and I’m excited to see his weekly progress. There are two main areas Barry needs to target when drawing hands and arms. The first is to show tapering of the arms by way of lines, really emphasizing curves against straights. Many of Barry’s arms show elements of parallel lines, which tend to flatten out the overall form. The other area that Barry needs to address is simplification of the fingers. The fingers taper, and if we look at them from the side we can see that the top of our fingers is essentially straight while the bottom of our fingers are curved. It’s also important to keep in mind that there is a perceptible gap between where our fingers originate from our hand, and where our thumb originates.

If we were to imagine looking at our right hand (palms up) as a trapezoidal shape, the fingers emanate from the top of that trapezoid, while the thumb emanates from the lower right side of the trapezoid. This demarkation needs to be clearly indicated when learning to draw hands. My suggestion would be for Barry to focus separately on hands and arms: i.e. draw the hands by themselves – and draw them big. Do the same thing, with just the arms.

Overall, I think Barry’s giving it a great effort – keep it up!

-Krishna