Hello, welcome to Proko.
My name is Stan Prokopenko.
This is gonna be a hand critique video.
Sorry for the little haitus.
I've been hanging out with my son.
There's a picture.
There's another one.
Anyway, so I'm gonna like finish up these hand critiques so we can move on to leg anatomy.
A lot of you guys have been really anxious to move on to leg anatomy.
So let's get these out of the way first, because hands are important and there were a lot of
assignments.
I think I had you guys do three or four assignments.
One of them was drawing from photos that I provided you, another one was to go back to
the hand bone assignments from back when we did hand bones, and to pull those assignments
out and add the surface anatomy to the bones that you drew.
And then another one was to just invent hands, just imagine a hand and draw it from your
imagination.
That's obviously the hardest one.
So your watching the free version of this critique session.
The free version, I'm gonna focus on a problem that I saw you guys having,
which is being able to construct the hands out of basic forms.
I saw that this was hurting the way you guys are drawing things.
Your hands were out of perspective,
or when your starting a shade your not understanding the volumes that your shading.
And starting the construction of the hand with basic blocks and cylinders
will help you solve a lot of those other problems.
So I'm gonna focus on that today,
and if you wanna watch all the other problems that I talk about,
goto proko.com/anatomy. And watch the full video.
Alright let's begin.
The first critique will be for Apollo Jeanne Hyacinthe.
I don't know, Apollo.
Okay.
So aside from them being kind of messy and scribbly, I feel like you are drawing purely
observationally.
You're looking at your photograph or your hand and you're just trying to copy the contours.
You're copying exactly what you're seeing, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That's one way of drawing.
It's a good way of drawing.
With hands, I feel like it's important to understand the structure to draw them better.
And I really think that it would help you to improve your hand drawings, is to learn
how to construct the hands.
Rather than just copying what you see, you reconstruct what's actually happening there,
starting with simple forms, your primary forms, then adding secondary, and then adding tertiary
forms on top, then adding light and all that stuff.
That's actually gonna also help you to be able to draw from imagination, because if
you are reconstructing what you're seeing in your photograph, then you can put it away
and reconstruct it again because you know you can start from a simple thing and then
just slowly add complexity to it.
It's a lot easier to do it that way than from your imagination, just start drawing details
and get it all correct.
So I'm gonna take this one drawing that you did, and I'm gonna try to draw it again.
But I'm gonna reconstruct it with some simple forms.
This is step one of the construction phase.
So instead of drawing all these little squigglies that you have, a little line, line, little
lines like and trying to follow the contours, instead I'm gonna think about the first form,
which is like the palm.
It's a box.
It's not a perfect box.
It's slightly curved on the front, and it's got that carpal tunnel curve this way.
And then it's a little...
Watch the video to figure out...you know, to see what the little differences are from
a perfect box.
But we can think of a boxy form for the palm.
So I'm gonna follow the curve of the knuckles that you have here, like that.
That's a simple plane.
Then you have the back of the palm, the plane that connects to the wrist, and there's the
top plane of the boxy form.
And we're looking at that box slightly from the side.
You know, we're not looking straight at the top plane.
So we're gonna see a little bit of the thickness, like that.
We have the thickness of that box.
Here you go.
And then, you know, you got that little hockey puck in the back for the wrist that articulates
with the arm bones.
And then for the thumb, I like that triangle, right, that little triangle that you extend
from the palm box.
For the fingers, I'm gonna start by figuring out the curve.
I feel like some of the back fingers are a little too short, like if they look shorter
than that index and the middle is supposed to be the longest.
So that's not gonna work.
So I'm gonna curve it like this with the middle being the longest, index being a little shorter,
so big-picture stuff first.
And then, for the index finger, instead of following the contours, again I'm gonna simplify
it into a simple form.
In this case, I'm gonna use cylinders for the segments of the finger, for the fat pads
and stuff that are attached to it.
So I'm thinking of the cap of the cylinder right there.
And as far as proportions, that first segment is gonna be about half of that entire finger
length.
Okay.
And I can continue going down, same thing for the middle finger, segment here, segment
here.
I'm gonna go through here a little quickly.
You could do a little more carefully, but basically thinking about the cylinders and
how they are positioned in space, is it going away from you, is it going towards you, and
how much?
And same thing for the thumb, except the thumb only has, you know, the big triangle and then
two more, so cylinder in here, a little wedge.
All right.
Oh, and then the way it connects to the wrist, if you remember.
There's a little step up like that to the wrist, and this helps me keep all of this
in perspective because I'm basically just drawing angles.
All right, let's move this off to the side.
You can see I have a simple version of that hand.
The reason this is important is because I can make changes pretty easily and also I
can visualize the light and I can think, "Okay.
This is a cylinder.
It's very easy to invent the light on this cylinder."
And also, when you're just drawing details, even if it's from a photograph, if you have
the basic forms figured out, you can design your shapes, your detailed shapes to show
those forms better, and that's important.
You gotta make sure that your detailed shapes don't cause your primary forms to just disappear.
That happens all the time.
People get so caught up with all the little details that it actually flattens out the
drawing.
It actually looks less three-dimensional with all the details than if you just thought of
a simple wood carving of the basic forms and just drew that.
That looks more three-dimensional.
But if you think about how those details can help the simple forms, that'll make a much
stronger drawing.
And also, this is much easier to invent and keep all your proportions intact and your
rhythms going in the right direction, all that stuff.
This is how I want you to start thinking a little bit.
You know, you wanna do observational drawing as well to train your eye, but a little bit
of this early on in your education will help you to be able to think in both ways because
they are very different ways of thinking.
Okay, Apollo, thank you for submitting that.
Next one is Li Hao.
It's feeling very robotic because of that it feels very stiff.
You're not thinking about the gesture of those simple forms.
So, for example, when I think of the thumb, before I think of like the cylinder and the
wedge shape in there, I think of just a motion of the thumb.
That's the first thing.
Then I put the simple structure.
So with this thumb, the gesture that I would need to think about is this, it's coming
up, and you got that tendon.
It's like a little roller coaster, just swoops right up.
That's the gesture of the top, and actually right through there, it kind of follows it,
if you look at your own thumb shape kind of like that.
And then skin being stretched out in there, and then this overlaps.
You got that overlap correct.
So that's good.
Basically have the forms in here, the forms in here, and then skin stretching between
the two pretty tight.
So that's the gesture on top of that.
Then you can start building the cylinders, but you gotta make sure those cylinders are
following the gesture.
They're following the curve.
Same thing with that pinky, it's just going through there really straight, looks very
stiff.
Here's a little pattern I usually see with fingers that are either three-quarter view
or side view.
I like to find a curve out this way for the top and then back this way.
So it's like an S-curve gesture going through the finger, like that.
So see how that looks much nicer, got some flow.
It looks more alive.
It doesn't look like a robot.
And let me show you how I would take that gesture and then add structure to it.
Just because this is a flowy curve, doesn't mean you can't take that, add a few little
elements and make it look 3D all of a sudden, like watch.
I'll take that same exact gesture that I did.
I'll duplicate it.
And then just by adding a little cap at the end here, a little top plane to that, and
then right where that first segment attaches to the second, I'll add another little corner,
a little side plane, and then swoop through to the fingernail.
I'll just combine the second and third segments for now just because sometimes they will flow
one through the other.
Sometimes you'll get a corner there.
But you know, sometimes you'll get a finger where there's one corner and then just goes
through to the fingernail and you just have two pieces.
Sometimes you have three.
It just really depends on the pose.
So there's how you can take a nice gesture line.
Just add a few planes to it.
And there you go.
Now, you have structure, a simple structure but with a good flow to it.
Now, here's one where you shaded it.
I'm actually surprised that you don't have the simple forms shaded in very clearly, because
you have been constructing with very clear simple forms.
And then when you shaded it, it became mush.
You lost those simple forms.
And that's really where those simple forms would become important to remember.
That's the whole purpose of designing the simple forms in the first place.
So, here, let me show you an amazing drawing from Russian Academy.
So here's the final drawing that someone did.
You could see all these little details and tendons on the back.
You got the knuckles, little skin wrinkles and the knuckles in here.
There's a lot of details in there, right?
But then what I did on top of that is I kind of just removed those tertiary forms, a little
details on the skin, and now I have only the primary forms and the secondary forms.
You can start seeing now the top plane in here, the side plane in here.
Each finger has the top and side.
And it becomes very clear what those forms are.
The lighting that he put or she put on there is really showing off those forms very clearly
here.
And then I did another step where I took out the secondary forms, the knuckles and all
that stuff.
Now it's just primary forms.
It's only the block of the palm.
The blocks of the fingers becomes very clear what that is.
That's step one.
That's what you think of.
Then you add number two, secondary forms, and then you add tertiary forms.
But you could see even with the tertiary forms on there, you can still feel that blockiness
of the palm, the blockiness of the fingers.
It's still there.
The details don't get all mushed together.
So if we look back at yours, you see the difference how you...I can't feel those simple forms
on yours.
You know, for example, in here, I can see that this is a lighter plane and you're trying
to show there's a top plane.
And then it becomes a little darker in here, but there's so many shapes within that dark.
It's almost like this is happening, and then you have this, and then in here you got this
form coming out and you got all these little things.
There's just too many things, which causes me to lose that corner.
Where is that corner from top plane or side plane?
I'm not really sure.
Let's look back again, this one, and I'm just looking at the secondary forms here.
Again, top plane, side plane, and then in here we got a slightly more complex version
where we got top plane, side plane, and then one more step, like that.
But it's very clear.
It's not mushy.
He has very clearly defined edges of where those steps are changing.
So this is the bone corner in here and then there's the muscle and fat of the hypothenar
eminence, which comes out again.
So thank you, Lee, hopefully that helps you see the whole purpose of why we're simplifying
the forms in the beginning so that once you add the shading, we can keep that there, not
lose it in the details.
Next is Hyzalker Lucas.
So this one, I wanted to show because it's actually a really good example.
You're drawing little details and stuff, but I can still feel the simple forms.
You know, you don't have to draw a perfect box in there with every plane in there for
me to feel the forms.
You can do something like what you did here where you're indicating just these two corners,
this corner here and then just one little line going across.
And as long as all of those things combine in the right way to show a box, I'll feel
that box, you know, like let's say I have a box.
It's not a box.
It's an elongated rectangular box.
There you go.
It's like a segment of a finger.
I have, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine lines.
I don't have to draw all nine lines for the viewer to see that as a box, I could just
draw this, this, this and then down, the viewer can already see, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of
like the back corner of a box."
And then in here, I could attach whatever I want, but this part of it still feels boxy.
That's what you're doing with the fingers here.
You're showing that the back of the finger is boxy and you're indicating just one, two,
three lines.
And then at the front or the bottom is just soft, cushiony pads.
So you don't need to put boxes there.
You can put the little creases of how they overlap, and I'll still feel that there's
a box at the top.
Okay.
And that's what you're doing.
You're showing really good example...really good indications of boxes in the areas where
they're needed and then you're putting little details of where you can put details.
So this is a good example.
A few areas that we did lose a little bit our structure, I feel like this finger.
It's getting a little skewed, and that's I think because that back segment or the middle
segment of that finger is like almost hidden, but it's just a little bit still visible.
You have something like this going on where that top plane...it's like almost gone out
of view, right, like this.
So there's a finger.
Notice how I'm still showing a little bit of that top plane, but it's just so skinny
because we're looking like almost right parallel to that top point.
That's when it becomes kind of tricky.
But by showing a little bit of it and showing the right angles going in there, it actually
becomes very three-dimensional because it looks like it's coming right at us.
So, I feel like, you know, something more like that with that finger, probably a little
longer in the pinky.
Actually, shortened it a little too much.
That first segment is the longest.
But anyway, the whole point is that the middle segment there is...it's foreshortened quite
a bit, and showing that foreshortening will help with the depth.
Thank you everybody for submitting these.
I'm gonna do a part two to these hands.
There's so many.
I feel like I needed to break up into two sections.
These were all pretty much...most of these were inventions.
You guys were just drawing from your own hand or trying to draw surface anatomy on the bones
that you did before.
The next section will be the assignments that you guys submitted from the photos, drawings
from photos.
And that's gonna be a whole another critique episode coming up.
So, thank you everybody.
See you later.
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