I Can't Draw Hands

But I'm not too shabby at drawing weird fingers.

As designers, we often need to give context and scale to the objects we visualize on paper. A good way of doing this is showing them in relation to a hand. I found, however, that hands aren't easy to draw.

One time while trying to draw a hand, I ended up just drawing a bunch of fingers on a page. It was uncanny and weird, so I embraced it and continued to explore the concept. After that very first sketch I thought to myself I want to make this into an art project., and host a solo art show called "I Can't Draw Hands." Throughout my career as a creative, I have come across many people, whether they be illustrators, artists or casual doodlers, who have faced this same problem with drawing hands. So I knew I was not alone.

I continued to draw collections of fingers in compositions of five, so they had the same amount of fingers as a hand, but did not resemble a hand in the least.

Since I love to make things in all mediums, I soon moved on to creating construction paper collages. I came up with this piece called "100 Fingers No Hands," which is a collection of 20 five fingered compositions. To make these I drew a bunch of random fingers on colored paper and cut them out. I glued colorful nails onto the fingers, and arranged them in crazy orientations on other colored paper.

I did some digital drawing on my iPad, but I really wanted to get back to making something physical. I looked to painting, because it is a very traditional medium that I can use to explore a non-traditional topic.

This piece "Hand to the Sky" is acrylic on canvas, and really just came about from experimenting. I practiced mixing paint on the canvas to create the textured background, and I just went from there. It has inspired some more paintings that I am currently in the process of producing. In a future post I am going to discuss how productive it is to just try things.

But as I began to think more about creating an installation that people would come to. I knew I wanted to have some piece of art that people could take away with them. Paintings are usually expensive and prints aren’t as personal, so I thought about contemporary artists such as Takashi Murakami and Joe Kaws. I found it interesting that they created plushes that were informed by their sculptures and paintings. It is still a piece that can be displayed, but it can also be interacted with, in ways other than just visually.

So I created this hand made finger plush where each one is unique from the next.

I began to crank them out in different sizes and colors. I thought to myself, "these are so weird people might actually buy them." As I produced more and more people began to give me positive feedback. So I thought that as a way to get some more money to be able to invest in some of my other ideas for the project and buy the necessary materials, that I could launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. I have had decent success so far, as it has only been live a week and I am over 40% funded! But there is still a way to go.

You can do a few things for me:

1. Check out the project and if you like it support me!
2. Share the project with people you know who might enjoy it.
3. ReSteem this post so I can get more attention to my project and my Kickstarter.

As I create more content for this project I am going to post updates on here, and I even plan on doing a giveaway to get some plush fingers out to you all! Follow me to see more of my work, as I am just getting started on this platform!

Thanks for reading!