More Hands…

I realized the other day, while on the train constructing more hands, that in this book I’m saddled with drawing lots of hands – almost more than any other single thing. Why? Well, this is a set of ten separate conversations, and most of the conversations take place when the people involved are sitting together. They’re not moving around so much, not flying or fighting as in an adventure or hero comic (sorry if you’re hoping for that) – they’re relatively still. As you might have observed about people, when they are sitting, they mostly adopt the same one or two poses for long stretches. The changes from moment to moment are not so great, and then they mostly cycle from one position to another and then back again. So what are you left with? Hands. What are people doing with their hands while they talk. That’s where a lot of the action is. Now I don’t plan on drawing a million hand positions, but I do want to keep some expression and variety, as I said before, and so I’m going to be drawing a lot of hands. I’ve done 12 pages of finished (or near finished) art over the last two and a half weeks (not as swift as I’d like yet), and I realize that a lot of my time has been taken up with hands. Tiny hands, big hands, hands you’ll mostly never notice, but there they are…

Here are three more, (click for larger view – also, I shared some others a short while ago) in another of those tiny detailed panels… I show some of the rough construction work first, and then with the (mostly) finished line art and some of the colour…

-cvj