Twitter Hand Experiment

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I've written before about how important I think social media is for artists. It lets us connect with our friends and also fans. Early this AM I got kind of bummed about my difficulty with drawing hands so I set up a bunch of tweets about how much my hand drawings sucked and how I wanted people to tweet me pics of their hands. This am I had the brilliant idea of seeing if I could get someone who's art I really enjoy to tweet me a pic of her hands. So I tweeted at Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls, AFP, Evelyn Evelyn) this tweet and a little bit later she tweeted this back at me. My friends were already tweeting pics at me but after that I had a deluge of hand pics. I encouraged people to follow me because after I draw their hands I'm going to tweet photos of them. I followed everyone who tweeted a photo to me.

This is one of the more awesome experiments I've done with twitter. I've got a massive stack of prints of hands and a massive archive of hands to draw, and guess what? I'm going to draw them all.

You can draw along with me, I'll put up links below for some of the hand pictures so you can draw them too.

Links to the tweet with links to the pics in no specific order:

@craftjunkie

@lifeartdreams

@AmethystWax

@David973

@Monalinski

@msaester

@firrantello

@amandapalmer

@marykae

@springaldjack

@innistowinnis

@lydiaruth77

@iamanch

@ardentiaars

@zeeby

@mroseriddle

@bobschumaker

@artmodelandrew– this guy has a whole series of hand pics all sorts of poses!

@jupiterlullaby

@imcrook

@ginamieczkowski

@rocketrobby

@evelinetimeless

@emerson_street

@nightcsi

@badpatient

@lastwordy

@Emerson_Street

@blade21292

@poeticdreams

If there are more I'll update the list, feel free to draw along with me, as I draw them I'll post them.

Technique Tuesday: nanojoumo- purity

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nanojoumo- purity
Originally uploaded by lessherger

This was a NaNoJouMo prompt. I'm working in an 8×8 inch journal with Strathmore 400 series drawing paper inside. The paper is 90lb. I started out by gessoing the page lightly. I used a soft brush so as to leave few brush strokes.

I then used red acrylic in the upper left of the spread. I then googled the word purity to get some inspiration> For whatever reason when I think of purity I think of the absence of it. I also think of purity groups and… Well I find them hilarious. I won't go into it here, this is neither the time nor place, back to technique.

I found a particularly bad example of a "purity card." It was clear to me that someone's mom had made it in MSPaint. The design work is terrible. I pulled it up into GIMP and began my changes. I cleaned out the word purity and darkened some of the lines as well as cleaned up some of the other junk in the design. There was no making it much better than it was. I then printed it via laser printed to some transparency film. I knew it would give me the true "grunge" look the original artist was looking for and had failed miserably to attain.

I slathered on some gel medium and crossed my fingers, transfers are tricky at best and one this size was a lay it down and hope for the best kind of thing. I began burnishing the image with my bone folder. It transferred better than expected with some of the smaller areas not transferring well at all. The main part of the image transferred perfectly.

I then googled the image in the lower right, a woman bent over with little to nothing on. The best source for this sort of image? Car websites, apparently this is a favorite pose. It took some searching to find a "decent" image to draw from. I quickly sketched the image in pencil I intended the image to be black ane white but didn't like the way the legs looked in bl&w, so I added some color and shaded them in purple tones.I filled in the white gesso area with some green watercolor crayon.

After everything had dried I used a white paint pen to outline and fill in the word purity. I wanted it to pop off the page. I then added some water to gesso to make a runny paint. I allowed this to drip of each of the letters. I loaded up a large liner brush with the gesso and spattered it over the page… I allowed the paint to drip off the brush in several areas creating drops and splattered blobs of paint.

Faces 2 videos

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I get a lot of questions about faces and how to shade them what colors to use, wher are the darkest areas etc. I've got plans to do a video, but I suspect that my weird and kind of realistic style is not what people are looking for. I found this 2 part video by YouTuber MyCreativeBliss that details shading and coloring one of those faces with overly large eyes. She uses several shades of peach, cream and ochres to color the face and then Glazing medium to blend and melt the colored pencils together. It's an interesting technique that I'm going to have to test out, not on a big eyed girl face but somethign a little darker and creepy, because I'm like that. Anyway check out these 2 videos, if you are interested in big eyed girls you'll like them.

Part 1:

Part 2