May 1st 2026
Small hands
I started a larger oil painting.
Occasionally this happens, sometimes with good results but often it gets abandoned or just lays around looking disappointing.
But I think I am getting better at just enjoying the process.
I think… maybe…
This is not huge, maybe 16” x 20”, but I consider that to be more than just a sketch, (and who really decides how we define these things).
This is how this one is starting. I guess what we call an under-painting. Why yellow? Who knows? The frustrating part is often the feeling that this looks pretty good right here and anything I do to this will just make it worse. But on I go.
Here are the first couple stages:
Maybe we will see it as it progresses or maybe it will fall by the wayside forgotten.
Time will tell.
This idea started on a plane ride home from visiting the grand kids.
Hands are such a wonderful and beautiful part of the human anatomy but watching them at a young age, just getting started and then developing, is just fascinating.
This is the sketch I made on the plane ride home:
Probably, as I study these reference photos to try and understand the structure and mass and volume and connections, I will be doing a lot more of them. I find that drawing things many times really helps me to see. But on the surface it just looks like I am drawing the same thing over and over. Here are some others I have been poking around with the past couple weeks:
On the subject of iterations and lots of lines, I made a little video of a sketch book that I filled: https://www.john-huisman.com/a-used-up-sketch-book-april-2026/
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” — W.B. Yeats
A tune for the moment: