Page:Drawing for Beginners.djvu/67

 certainly longer to learn how to draw all the fingers of our left hand.

Little children are very clever at painting and drawing gloves. Sometimes I have pinned a shabby old leather and fur gauntlet to a board, and the painting has been surprisingly good. And yet had I suggested the drawing of a hand a wail of despair would have gone up. A glove is a step toward the drawing of a hand.

Have you drawn a hand, gloved?

If not I advise a trial. Take for choice a glove of a firm substance, leather instead of wool, and thick leather in preference to thin; if it has a gauntlet of fur so much the better.

Ask some kind friend to put his gloved hand on the top of a stick or an umbrella, and make a careful study of it. It will be simpler than the hand unclothed. The palm will be more of a mass, the seams will give the direction of the fingers, the wrinkles of the leather will give&mdash;more or less&mdash;the base of the thumb, the knuckles, and the wrist.

Having made a study of the gloved hand, ask your friend to remove his glove and resume the position with the bare hand.

If you can make the two drawings on the same sheet of paper you will find that your previous effort has helped you considerably to draw the ungloved hand.

Tight gloves distort and contract the hands, loose gloves disguise the shape, Do not let this worry you. Try to draw what you see&mdash;as you see it.

Another time you might persuade some one to hold up a hand palm toward you and fingers together. (See No. I, Fig. 16.)

Do not begin with sprawled fingers spreading apart, it is bewildering for a start.

Block all the fingers together and draw an imaginary line from the tip of the thumb to the fingers to check your proportions. Close up your own thumb and note that it reaches to the first joint of your forefinger. Thumbs, because of the deceptive nature of a curve, are often deprived of strength, length, and muscle. Note the large surfaces of muscle, the