Hands

For this project the requirements were to have two hands and use pure contour and zentangle. After viewing Kehinde Wiley’s work on black people in America, I knew I wanted to express my views about a current topic. Growing up as female I have been taught about sexual assault and what to do if I’m ever put in an uncomfortable situation. I don’t think we should have to give young children these messages as it is damaging. I decided to draw a women with her hands covering her breasts because I was planning on doing a piece about sexual assault. First I sketched the hands and the body. I cropped my reference picture, shifting the woman’s body to the left side so the piece would be slightly off balance to create interest. I then went and outlined her body with a fine point marker. I made the hands be the pure contour part of the piece and drew in her knuckles and nails, and some veins which were prominent. I then put designs on her hand for the zentangle part of the piece to emphasize the hands because I wanted to use that as almost a focal point or the “main idea”. I used light pink to fill in her finger nails because pink is considered a very feminine color and I wanted to play off of that. I knew I wanted to add shading to create depth but I went back and forth whether to use colored pencil, graphite, or pen to do cross-hatching. I decided to use stippling to shade which added texture and interest in the piece. I also added a few flowers below her chest to bring the light pink back into the piece and also because flowers are considered feminine. One of the troubles I had was getting the hands to be to proportion and getting the right shapes down. The women in my reference picture was fairly thin so her fingers were very bony and I kept trying to draw them bigger. When adding the stippling affect I had to be careful not to smudge the dots, which was hard. I chose not to activate the background space because the figure is very intricate and I didn’t want to distract from it.