Consider the blocks

I'm working on a painting based on a photo I took of the Foxboro Orpheum Theater's production of Cabaret. It's the largest painting I've done, to date, and it has taken me the most time to do.

Today I worked on painting the hands. I have always enjoyed drawing and painting hands, but I have also always struggled with them. Visually, they are full of lines and odd angles. Hands are very expressive and can reveal a lot of emotion. Like the face, subtle differences in the way the fingers relate to each other can have huge differences in the feelings they express.

And then there's the proportion. It's one thing to draw hands by themselves, it's another thing, entirely to draw a hand that looks like it belongs to a character in a scene. Because the hands come at the end of the arms, they can be thrust forward towards the viewer or angled away. These actions can cause the hands to appear larger or smaller in comparison to the rest of the character.

This ability of the hands to put themselves out away from the rest of the body can lead to other interesting visual effects. If you put your hand, palm out in front of your face and directly in front of your friend's face, you can make it appear to your friend that your hand is not really attached to anything.

Although this is fun in real life, it can be difficult to capture on canvas without leaving the viewer to wonder what happened to the figure's arm.

It's a lot of pressure to put on an artist to capture all the subtleties of the hand's expression while keeping it in proper proportion to the rest of the figure and still seem somehow attached and belonging to the figure.

I faced up to some of this pressure today as I worked on the Cabaret painting, and I learned a thing or two:

• First, you don't have to show a continual connection between the figure and the hand in order to let the viewer know they are connected. You can use color and proximity to connect the hand.
• Second, treat the hands as if they were made out of several connected blocks. Each of the four fingers is built with three rectangular blocks linked together. The thumbs have only two.

This second concept is illustrated in this image taken from the painting work I did today. By treating the fingers as being built from blocks, I find it much easier to paint them. Each digit is made up of several straight strokes. Highlighted strokes across one plane and darker strokes across the perpendicular planes.

Treating the fingers and the hands like as blocky strokes and planes, helped me get over my hand hurdles today.