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I’ve seen a lot of posts about how to draw hands or posts with lots of screenshots from real life or Disney films for a reference to copy but I’ve never seen one with Robert McKimson hands. 

I really like Robert McKimson hands, whether drawn by himself or by other animations in the cartoons he directed.

Robert McKimson hands strike a balance between basic cartoon hands and really complicated realistic hands that are very hard to animate. It’s the next step up from Preston Blair. As a reference, here’s the how-to for drawing cartoon hands by the great animator Preston Blair.

In contrast the McKimson hands I’ve posted have longer fingers, more wrinkles and more bends than the Blair hands. They’re more specific, but they’re not ridiculously complicated like some Disney human hands. 

Some of the hands I posted look like they were drawn by McKimson himself (or someone with similar skills) and some look like they were drawn or in-betweened by a less skilled animator. You can tell because some of the hands have more details & curves than others and the fingers bend twice (like real-life hands). In some of the hands it looks like someone simplified the fingers a bit, even so they’re still very good to copy.

Although keep in mind if you’re new to drawing, the Preston Blair hands are the best ones to start off with.

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20150405 　彩もふ2

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You may get asked this a lot, so please excuse my ignorance - but how do you go about constructing character expressions and body language and such? Thanks!

Besides The Basics (construction of heads and skulls and muscles and skeletons and how they move), I’ll go over some things I’ve been trying to work on myself lately:

1. Treat expressions as a single gesture of the face/head, as opposed to a head and then individual features dumped on a plate and arranged into an expression.

First, just get down the big shapes of your expression, just like you would for a pose.  

So say I wanna do a low angle angry pose.  I know the features are gonna be all mashed down at the bottom because of perspective.

 Scribble it down

start to put on features

fix stuff

put on more stuff

fix stuff again

erasing and flipping and stuff a whole bunch until you are happy with it or stop caring

Whole head is a gesture!

2. Just like a facial expression, jot down where the important parts of an entire pose goes first.  You can force the rest of the body to fit the pose.

So here I knew I wanted the shoulders tilted a certain direction, and te hand to be in that particular position in front of her face. 

That’s the simplest explanation I got.  Don’t be afraid to push and pull faces and bodies around! Worry about being “on model” last!

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I love Mangle :)

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The Pooch Selfie is a ball holder for your smart phone so that your dog stares at your phone while taking better selfies.

http://odditymall.com/pooch-selfie-phone-ball-holder

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My first 7 Inktober pictures. I chose Poodle trims as my theme

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Bunny fursona ref for Scrufflebottom

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Just some creative grooming on a special Pomeranian I know. All dyes are dog-specific product, completely safe and non toxic. :) 

Warren London’s Critter color: Orange County House Hound

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How is your art so cute!?

Killed a bunch of kittens, I paint using their blood, it really adds that something special, ya know?

Oh! and thanks :)

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Ruby and Saphire in Marker with gem embellishments

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 . Lapis Lazuli in marker

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What? No. I did not drive 30 minutes to buy $70 worth of purple markers just so I could work on one picture.

Don’t be ridiculous

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Someone finally watched Steven Universe.

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Hey, all. This is a comic I started on 24 Hour Comic Day, but I only managed to complete 12 pages on that day. That makes it a technical failure, but I decided it was worth finishing…