Hand jive

I mentioned before that I'm really bad at hands, legs, feet and lower torso. That being the case, I decided to draw more of them.  I really have no natural talent for drawing, so I think I'll need to draw a thousand more before I get a better idea of how to do it.  Here's a good two dozen hands for tonight:

Here's one page.  It's not much to look at, but it took a long time to do.  I've decided to focus on fundamentals as much as I can for the time being.  That means lots of reference material, drawing by sight and trying to remember what the heck things look like.  I kept it to one or two positions for tonight just to keep it simple.  If I can't remember the basic structure of the hand I'm going to have a lot more trouble in the complicated positions.  I think I got one or two that looked okay here, but for the most part they're pretty crap.  Oh well, practice makes perfect...or better, anyway.

I picked up an interesting technique from an anatomy book of mine, at least for simple positions.  The index to ring fingers form a column that extends to the arm, then the base of the thumb and pinky are added onto each side.  If you look at your hand with your fingers perfectly straight you can see the lines.  It's a neat little trick, but it's not going to help for very many positions, I think.

Anyway, I'll keep practicing and if all goes well then hopefully you'll be seeing comic panels up here in a few months.  Joy!

I bet you think I'm going to link to the song "Willie and the Hand Jive" now that I've mentioned it in the title.  HA!  You're wrong.  Here's a straight up techno song by an electronic producer I like named Russ Chimes.  It's part 1 of a 3 part series of indie film and modern disco.  IT'S HIPSTER-RIFIC!

You're winner!

I had a final exam review class today and he spent half the class going over stuff from the midterm.  I already passed that!  I know that stuff already!

Since it was boring hearing it all again, I drew some stuff instead:

There was a question on computer-assisted audit techniques.  So I drew a cat.  Also, a Spongebob without reference material, so he looks completely wrong.

Here are Fred and Wilma from memory, so obviously I completely forgot what they look like and drew them totally wrong.  I also stuck some faces in there just for fun.

Since I drew everything wrong but it still looks okay...a winner is me!  Enjoy some Cameo:

Sketching is a good thing

I've heard a lot of good things about sketching and doodling when you're trying to concentrate or learn.  It activates several methods of learning at once: visual, tactile and emotional.  It also helps you focus and keeps your mind sharp for those 3 and 4 hour lectures.  If you can manage to concentrate on a lecture while still drawing, it makes it much easier to retain the information...provided you don't tune out the lecturer completely!

I tend to do a lot of drawings while I study (actually most of the drawings I've done lately have been in my course notes)  and they don't make it into these posts.  I thought I would do a post of some of my study stuff.  That said, here are some more sketches I did while in class.  I pulled out the notes as much as I could, because I don't think you care about that.

Here are some interesting looking cartoons.  I like the one with the big creepy mouth.

Here is some person's face.

Here is a punk rocker.

I did this one during a particularly boring and irrelevant lecture.  There was literally nothing to write down that wasn't already in the powerpoint.  It was really dull.

I thought this one was cute.

Here's a Jang and Decker in a bit of a different style.  I like it.

Here's a fox thing.  I thought it was a fun simple cartoon.

This is a very bad picture of my instructor.  It doesn't look much like him at all, but I guess as a general picture it looks alright.

Here's a more typical Jang and Decker.

I liked this snake and swimmer.  The nose on the swimmer looks kind of neat.  The swimmer is kind of weird though because the swim cap and goggles don't look quite right.

Anyway, here's some cool funk from the UK's Incognito that you can listen to while you look at the pictures.

Tons more sketches

It's not that I haven't been drawing, it's just that I haven't been posting.  Let's get right to it, because there's a lot:

I think this one was a warm-up page.  I like the goblin on the left and the big-haired guy on the right though.

This one was another warm-up, it has a fat he-man or something there.  Then there's some moustache guy with an odd angle to his legs there.

This page has some neat stuff on it.  The passed-out drunk guy is neat, I like the ducks and the sneaky coveralls guy.  The fat guy with the hairy back doesn't pop right out, but I like him too.

This is a nice page, I think there's a lot to like here.

I was trying some different things with this page here.  I like the top hat guy and the dumb looking kid.  I did some eyes earlier that reminded me of what they do for Sonic the Hedgehog, so I tried that there just from memory.  It didn't turn out so great, but whatever.  We're not about high art around here, or even good art for that matter. 

 This is just some stuff where I was playing with different shapes and angles.

I kind of like the Harry Potter-ish kid and the Zoidberg.  Other than that I was playing around with trying to draw some hands and other junk.  I'm really bad at drawing hands.  I need to work on that.

Here I was drawing some more objects and things in weird ways.  I like the motorcycle, it was drawn completely from memory, so I guess I look at motorcycles too much.  Then there's two kinds of creeper in there.  I think the guy at the bottom is a wrestler.

I like this page because I went back to Trans-Am Sam, who has now become Hot Tub Joe because I couldn't remember his name at the time.  There's some more objects in here as well.  I also drew a nice Dracula and some superheroes.  I don't often draw superheroes because I don't know what they look like very well.

There's some fun stuff in here.  I really like the kid at the top-right, so I drew him again next to Batman from a different angle.  Then of course there's Batman there too.

There's some fun stuff in here.  I wondered what Jang would look like with a mouth, so I gave him one.  There's a snaggle-toothed little girl in there that I kind of liked, so I put two of them in there.  There's some skinny guy who looks kind of neat and a kid on a park bench.  At the bottom I think that's kind of that alien from "The Day The Earth Stood Still".

There's another Jang with a mouth in here, plus a scientist and some more hands and faces.  I like the haggard looking guy in the top left.

I thought this page was pretty fun.  I pretty much like everything on this page.  There's a lot of cool stuff here.

This is another really good page.  I enjoyed this one a lot.  The guy with pizza on his shirt kind of looks like D.

This is another fun page.  The two on the bottom-left was a face I requested from someone else and then I tried to redraw it just to the right.

This page is kind of fun, Deke makes an appearance again after *ages* of not being drawn.  Poor guy.  He looks a bit better now, I think.  There's also a ninja turtle there too.

Here's something to listen to while you go through it all.  This is a collab from a guy called Mitch Murder who is an electronic producer I had never heard of and a vocalist named Kristine, who is from Greece.  Mitch did the video too, apparently (he didn't animate it obviously, I think it's from Bubblegum Crisis or something).  I like the old 80s anime style too, because who really cares about framerates?