Friday, March 13, 2009

black hands




Howdy Folks,
  At lunch this week, there was talk about the difficulty of drawing hands. I mentioned that I once did a whole series of cartoons were all the hands of the characters were black. I said that I would show them to y'all. I attached them here. What do you think - are the black hands weird? I thought that they might be signature style for me. They were not commercially successful so I abandoned the idea.  

4 comments:

  1. As far as using the black hands as a signature style - why limit yourself? Your style is distinctive and I don't think it needs a repeating gimmick.

    Also, there's the risk of miscommunication: people scratching their heads and wondering "but what do the hands MEAN?"

    "Opera Buff" is great. Sing! Sing!

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  2. Great images. I think I would have thought all the characters were wearing gloves if you had not mentioned they were an element of the cartoon stylization.

    My favorite is also the opera singer. She needs a fat horse like in the Warner Brothers cartoon.

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  3. These are great. I'm going to have to come down on the side of no black hands for the characters. Plus what are you going to do if you have to draw an illustration of a character who has spilled ink on his hands?

    People will say, "Where's the ink? All his characters already have black hands!"

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  4. Daryll,
    Of course, I never thought of that possibility. I think you all are right, the black hands are not necessary. All of the inking and coloring were done in Flash from a very rough pencil sketch. I guess the black hands were a shortcut for me using the black brush tool for the small inked lines of the fingers.
    Thank you all for your feedback - it is really great to have this forum. I think this blog is a great idea - you can get feedback that is better because people have time to think about it.

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