Hands do a lot of the talking for us. AJ Power reminded me of this when I dropped in on a recent Comics class. He was inviting students to illustrate the moods and interactions between characters by drawing their hands in gestures. That hit me as one of those obvious yet totally overlooked aspects of figurative work, and expressive portraiture. Where are the hands?!? All of the narratives, emotions, and expressions people can express with their hands! Why haven’t we been drawing them in my portraits and figurative classes?
I was so excited about the idea that I made a class to study expressive hands and heads. I started thinking about what works in a drawing and what doesn’t, and I started collecting examples. Some I collected because I appreciated the rendering. Some I collected because the artist surpassed drawing and the art reads as pure expression.
I’ve collected so many I’ll be sending these in installments, starting with my favorite: Käthe Kollwitz. Her drawings and prints surpass rendering and elevate to pure expression. Look how she combines hands and head together, with the hands oversized, acting as the primary voice or expression, quite often speaking more for the person than the face. The body, if it is included, is simplified to support the expression of the hands. Other narrative elements are edited out. She’s powerfully direct, and in that directness, she gives us deeply relatable emotions and primal narrative, all through physical gesture.
…The keenest among you might have noticed that a few drawings are kind of similar to a study, only reversed. Remember prints make reverse images, so while flipped imagery isn’t common for drawings and paintings, it is a natural part of the printmaking process.
This proclamation didn’t stop Chuck Close, who started painting portraits in the 1960s, 10 years after Pollock’s most famous drip paintings, and still during Greenberg’s reign. “I thought, ‘Well then, that field is wide open.’ And why the fuck can’t you make a portrait anyway?” – Chuck Close An informative little video WTF The quotes …
[image_with_animation image_url=”7550″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] Using a ruler and colored pencils/pens on paper, or string and nails, or by fastening skewers, use straight lines at intervals to make a curve. There are a lot of ways to approach this project. For a simplified “How To” with 3 printable templates, click here. To print out graph …
Today is Design Friday, so your challenge is something the graphic designers will likely be familiar with: figure/ground reversal. “Figure/ground” is a phrase that came from modern German Gestalt psychology. It refers to how our mind organizes forms, distinguishing an object (figure) from its background (ground). In the early 1900s Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin famously experimented …
Drawing Hands: Käthe Kollwitz
Hands do a lot of the talking for us. AJ Power reminded me of this when I dropped in on a recent Comics class. He was inviting students to illustrate the moods and interactions between characters by drawing their hands in gestures. That hit me as one of those obvious yet totally overlooked aspects of figurative work, and expressive portraiture. Where are the hands?!? All of the narratives, emotions, and expressions people can express with their hands! Why haven’t we been drawing them in my portraits and figurative classes?
I was so excited about the idea that I made a class to study expressive hands and heads. I started thinking about what works in a drawing and what doesn’t, and I started collecting examples. Some I collected because I appreciated the rendering. Some I collected because the artist surpassed drawing and the art reads as pure expression.
I’ve collected so many I’ll be sending these in installments, starting with my favorite: Käthe Kollwitz. Her drawings and prints surpass rendering and elevate to pure expression. Look how she combines hands and head together, with the hands oversized, acting as the primary voice or expression, quite often speaking more for the person than the face. The body, if it is included, is simplified to support the expression of the hands. Other narrative elements are edited out. She’s powerfully direct, and in that directness, she gives us deeply relatable emotions and primal narrative, all through physical gesture.
…The keenest among you might have noticed that a few drawings are kind of similar to a study, only reversed. Remember prints make reverse images, so while flipped imagery isn’t common for drawings and paintings, it is a natural part of the printmaking process.
Related Classes
Expressive Portraits starts 9/18
Head & Hands starts 9/25
Comics starts 10/7
Woodblock Portraits starts 10/19
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This proclamation didn’t stop Chuck Close, who started painting portraits in the 1960s, 10 years after Pollock’s most famous drip paintings, and still during Greenberg’s reign. “I thought, ‘Well then, that field is wide open.’ And why the fuck can’t you make a portrait anyway?” – Chuck Close An informative little video WTF The quotes …
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[image_with_animation image_url=”7550″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] Using a ruler and colored pencils/pens on paper, or string and nails, or by fastening skewers, use straight lines at intervals to make a curve. There are a lot of ways to approach this project. For a simplified “How To” with 3 printable templates, click here. To print out graph …
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn’s “Memories of Many Nights of Love” Seattle Artist League: art school, art classes, painting classes, figure drawing
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Today is Design Friday, so your challenge is something the graphic designers will likely be familiar with: figure/ground reversal. “Figure/ground” is a phrase that came from modern German Gestalt psychology. It refers to how our mind organizes forms, distinguishing an object (figure) from its background (ground). In the early 1900s Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin famously experimented …