drawing hands

Two recent linocuts

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

I seem to be on a theme of hands (there are always a couple available to draw). These two prints are both derived from drawings of my own hands, which were interesting challenges! For the first one, I posed my left hand against a mirror. The second, ‘Sanctuary’, was more of a memory test as, clearly, I could not keep the pose and draw at the same time. (Only after taking the prints did I notice a mistake in the anatomy of one of the palms. Hopefully it’s not too obvious or distracting!) They are shown hanging on the drying rack at the Marketplace Print Studio in Cockermouth.

Linoprint of a left hand and its mirror image with text: 'the looking through a glass darkly'
Linoprint: ‘Chirality’ 2025
Linoprint of hands with intertwined fingers above the silhouette of a small building
Linoprint: ‘Sanctuary’ 2025

Drawing: adding and taking away

~ flissw ~ 2 Comments

Note to self, on rubbing out:

As a child, you want to rub it all out ‘cos it’s all wrong! Start again from scratch or screw it up and throw it away in a fit of temper.

Later, when drawing from life, you think: don’t rub everything out; the ‘wrongness’ can only be in the relationships between marks, so you need to choose which of them to adjust. And don’t rub out before you have corrected the error, because it is a marker to work from. If you take it away you may just repeat the error, i. e. redraw the line in the same place.

Ideally, you think, never rub anything out – each mark should be a considered mark of observation worth keeping (this is a vain pose).

Then (lastly?) you recognise that the eraser is a positive tool – creating light, adjusting a line, balancing tone, making more precise etc. Taking away can be just as creative and selective and considered as adding a mark (this would be obvious if you started from the position of a carver).

And singular precision of line (as opposed to multiple exploratory wanderings) can also be worth pursuing. It’s all a matter of choice and awareness, of not automatically following a knee jerk reaction but being able to recognise that reaction and choose whether to go with it or not.