Kittyspam and drawings

[telophase]

Got a new toy - a puffball on a spring.


And achieved a Sanzo glare. XD




She really prefers to lay on her side and play with it that way, being a LAZY-ASS KITTY, but she occasionally plays with it in an upright position:




After exerting herself for approximately two and a half minutes, she now takes a well-earned snooze to recover.




I finally got off my ass and started soemthing I'd been wanting to do - go through a magazine (last month's Vanity Fair for those keeping score) and draw all the hands. Well, I'm not drawing all the hands, but the three hours total of drawing (would be more except I watch TV while doing it and keep getting distracted by the Mythbusters and whoever else is on) have produced the proof that yes, as long as I'm looking at soemthing else and they're not attached to anything, I can usually draw hands.

The problem comes, of course, when I'm trying to figure out how they should go *and* have them the right size and shape for whoever they're supposed to be attached to.

Comments

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

Do you know the three-plane method for positioning hands? I find it... somewhat helpful. (Hands are quite difficult. Particularly right hands (for a righty like me) as I cannot simply pose my own hand and then draw it!

...I guess I could rig a mirror. I need a pliant roommate, or something.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Nope. Never even heard of it. :)

I can't even use a mirror - my hands are small and pudgy and apparently my thumbs are freakishly short or something. It's almost impossible for me to look a tmy hands and draw them as long, bony manga hands. I can go the other way if I need to - turn long bony hands into pudgy round ones - but I can't use my hands very well.

What finally got me doing this project was the thought that I'd be creating a hand library for myself. That and i got tired of not beign able to draw hands and having my characters all having freakish mutant things on the ends of their arms.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

OK-- in case it's helpful at all, here's the method (I learned this in an art class in high school. Woo.)

The basic structure of the hand is three planes/ thin rectangles: the main meaty part of the hand, the plane between the first and second knuckles of all the fingers, and the plane between the second and third knuckles. (You can fudge the last segment of finger; it mostly follows the third plane.) Basically, to get your hand at the right angle, you can pencil in your nice rectilinear planes in perspective and then get the hand position within that framework. It's sort of like drawing in squares-in-perspective first to show oddly positioned objects, like keys lying diagonally on tables... (which incidentally is a problem that gives me so much respect for the old Dutch masters).

It is not helpful for thumbs.

Me, I spent the last summer Olympics with a friend's TiVo freeze-framing the pole vaulters and hurdlers and drawing their positions. (Because that's going to be useful for reference... yeah.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks. :D

I think this issue of Vanity Fair is going to fall apart by the time I'm done with it. XD