02 Feb Sketched Hand Postcard #26

One of my 2015 resolutions is to improve my drawing skills and I have been reading the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. It is available at Amazon andChapters. Within the first two chapters, I already had several a-ha moments of why my drawing techniques never improved. And since I wasn’t able to improve them, I stopped focusing on drawing or sketching as a strength and focused on other abilities and talents.

But I started doing the exercises and I am gaining lots of confidence. Hands are one of the most difficult subjects to draw. They are just strange and every person has slightly different hands. But this book encourages you to draw hands to gain confidence and show how difficult subjects become easy when you break down what you are looking at into simple shapes and how they are related to one another.

Below is a sketch of my hand holding a paintbrush. The initial sketch was in pencil and then I quickly traced it with a felt tip pen on tracing paper to get the scanned image below.

I brought it into Photoshop to tweak the levels and then added some of my favourite water colour style paint splats. I like to organic loose feeling of the drawing and the bright colours.

Another resolution I have is to learn some basic animation in After Effects. I still only know the basics and am literally just starting out but I was able to pull my Photoshop layers into After Effects and create an animated GIF to add more life to my postcard design.