Drawing people’s hands, elephants’ tails, and pink lemonade trees
What they all have in common and a little challenge for you to try
It can be a satisfying exercise to sketch an outline of your hands. When feeling especially confident, try to sketch someone else’s.
I think the key to drawing hands is observing each cylindrical section of the fingers, paying attention to their orientation in 3-dimensional space, and their level of tension, relative to each other.
Your practice with complex forms helps in other ways:
Drawing people : young children walking, running, or leaping. A child has a very dynamic stance, and their limbs are not stiff and rigid even when still. Draw someone who is slouched or curled on a sofa chair.
Elephants can have a surprising appearance of lightness of gait, not lessened by their trunk and tail.
Illustrating a bed of wildflowers or a group of trees also requires careful observation and composition.
Even the blossoming crêpe myrtle, below, has a structure that somewhat resembles the human hand. It is crowned (gloved) with a tight crop of dark leaves and confetti-like flamingo-coloured blossom.
It would be a lovely tree to illustrate because in real life it attracts songbirds and wrens, which make for an attractive subject. Add some Indian elephants ridden by princes and princesses!
Trees which are open, letting light spill through them, are even harder to paint faithfully than hands, in my opinion. The shadow on the ground makes for an extra challenge.
The tree’s shadow can make for a great composition, creating depth and adding leading lines to the picture. Dappled light in the shadows can add areas of visual interest as a kind of negative counterbalance to positive areas like confetti blossom or wildflower heads.
Illustration really zings when line and form balances texture and contrast. So always look for the hard and soft edges.
Drawing trees, with open structure like jacarandas (not pictured), and these pink lemonade trees/shrubs (staghorn sumac)* and willow below, is a lot of fun, don’t you think?
* actually not sure if those are staghorn sumac. Could they be ash trees? Neither make sense to me because this garden is on the edge of a river flood plain. I’ll try to find out from the owner of the garden. Does anyone care to make an educated guess?
I am not sure - that tree lives in a different region than I do. I took that photo in Colorado, while on a trip.
I have never looked at trees through this lens of drawing (probably because I do not draw) but this is so interesting! I notice shadows and things from a photography perspective but is very curious to think of the transitions of learning to draw shapes and how nature could connect to the similarity of drawing hands! This is so exciting! I can’t wait to go into the woods and look at bits with this new eye!