Applehands

As in anything you do consistently, you occasionally make little alterations and refinements to the way you do it, and gradually, accumulatively, you get better. So it is with sketching, I find I will make a mark, or a way of dealing with something that works well, and I use it again until it becomes part of the whole.

This is often just stylistic things, the real changes - how you really see things, how you interpret everything around you - happen magnificently rarely. This isn't one of those posts.

But what does happen, is all the little tricks and quirks you have added come together and you do a drawing that seems to you to be a new step forward. A sign post that you are on vaguely the right path.

Or at least some kind of path, rather than thrashing in the brambles.

Yesterday gave me just such a sketch.

You'll need to click on it and enlarge it as it gets a bit lost as it sits here.

Usually I sketch and turn the page, move on to the next one, and only really go back and look at what I drew at the end of the day. This one stopped me, and made me think, you know, I like that.

The guy was intent on doing something with his i-phone ( nothing new there then ) and I took the opportunity to focus on his hands, trying to see the shapes and structure of them, as his thumbs jabbed and swiped.

What do I think makes this a signpost sketch ? The way I now treat hair. The hands. Loving hands, but they are BUGGERS to draw. The lack of wrong lines. ( only one and I shaded it in to loose it ).

The overallnessness of it.

I don't really know.

Okay, trumpet blown, back slapped. Going back to the day job.