From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

850 Tracing your actual hand on an iPad

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

850 Tracing your actual hand on an iPad

- [Deke] In this movie, I'm going to begin the process of drawing my elaborate hand turkey by literally setting my hand on the surface of an iPad and tracing it. Here we are looking at what is actually a couple of photographs of my right hand, and that's because I'm left-handed. So I'm using my left hand to trace my right hand. If you're right-handed, by all means, trace your left hand. Now, notice here we have a horizontal version of the hand, and here we have a vertical one. It's slightly out of focus, which might actually be a good thing, but it's good enough for tracing purposes. All right, so here we are in Adobe Photoshop Sketch, running on an iPad Pro, but you can be using any app you like. Now, I'm going to create a new document by tapping the plus sign in the bottom right corner of the screen, that blue plus sign right there. And then I'll set the format to iPad Pro Landscape, which in my case is located in the top left corner of the screen. And now I've got a new document. Now, notice that my layers are located on the left side of the screen. My brushes are on the right. Once again, that's because I'm left-handed. By default, it's the other way around. All right, and I'm going to tap on the background layer at the bottom of the stack, and then I'll tap the plus sign to create a new layer. And because I want to import a photographic image, I'm going to select Image Layer. Next, I'll select On My iPad. And then I'll go ahead and switch to Favorites just to keep things simple. And I'll select this horizontal hand right here, which will come up inside of a placing boundary. Now, I want the hand to take up more or less the entirety of the canvas. So I'm going to pinch outside. So two-finger pinch outside of that boundary in order to reduce the size of the canvas on screen. So I'm just zooming out. And then I can scale the hand by dragging on the corner handles, if I like. Or I can just two-finger pinch inside of that boundary. Now, I don't want to take care of up the entire canvas, because that'll make it too big, in which case it'll be bigger than my actual hand, which I will be tracing. And so I'll go ahead and make it about yea big, let's say. That should work. And then I'll tap the Done button in the top right corner of the screen. All right, now I'm going to tap on the sketch layer, which is the top layer in the stack. And I'll go ahead and switch to the graphite pen, which, by default, is located at the top of the brushes. And so I'll go ahead and tap on it to bring up its settings. And then I'll tap on the settings icon right there in order to demonstrate that this is, indeed, the graphite pencil. Notice that the color is set to absolute black. I've set the flow to whatever its default setting is. I think it's something like 66, by the way, here inside Sketch. And I've also set the size, which is this top option here, this top circle, to 14, like so. All right, now I'm going to do a quick two-finger pinch just in order to center my zoom, like so. And then I'll tap the double-arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen in order to hide the interface. All right, now I'm going to do something you can't see in this video. I'm going to lay my actual, physical right hand onto the right hand in the photograph so that I can trace exactly around it. And this is what you might do as well. All right, so now it's just a matter of painting, with my Apple Pencil, by the way, on the surface of my iPad. So I'm just tracing around my actual hand. Now, if you see something like that happen, where you get a gap between the lines, don't worry about it, just move on. It's a function, by the way, as far as I can tell, of the fact that I have my hand on the screen, so I'm touching the screen at the same time that I am trying to draw. So at this point, it's really just a matter of very carefully tracing your hand. Actually, I shouldn't say very carefully. I'm not trying that hard. I do need to make sure my pencil is straight up and down when I trace around the inside edge of the wrist. And that is it. Now I am done tracing my hands. Now, it doesn't necessary look great, which is why you might want to make some modifications. And so I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on my pinky here. And that's just a standard two-finger pinch outward. And now I'll go ahead and paint in some new lines. And apparently, I accidentally switched to the eraser. So I'll tap the double-arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen to bring back my interface. And I'll tap on that brush in order to view all of the brushes. And I'll switch back to the graphite pencil. And now I'll go ahead and paint around that missing detail, like so. And I might go ahead and trace around my ring finger a little bit as well, and even try to smooth out some of the details. And I might bring this fingertip up, like so. And then, if I go too far, I can always erase by tapping the checkerboard pattern down here at the bottom of the brush list, which represents the eraser, and then erasing these details, like so. And then I'll erase up into the fingernail. And I'm trying to be more or less careful, but you don't have to get it exactly right. We're just roughing out the lines to get things started. And now I'll tap on the graphite pencil to select it once again, there at the top of the brush list. And I'll go ahead and paint in the missing stuff along the third finger and my index finger right here, like so. So notice that things aren't an exact match with the template. That's okay. If you want to change things around, you most certainly can. So I'll go ahead and draw in some of that flesh right there and paint some of the excess stuff away. And then we've got the problem of the wrist. So I'll go ahead and paint in more of the wrist, like so, so that we just have a little bit of extra edge going on right there. And now I'll switch to the eraser and get rid of the stuff that I don't want. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the graphite pencil. And I might add a few crease lines, like these guys right here. I can either exactly follow the template or not. Totally up to you, by the way. And so I'll go ahead and add these lines. And I'll add another one coming out here. And we just want some definition, a little bit, that is, around the wrist. All right, so quick two-finger pinch, just so that we can see the hand. And if you want to view the tracing independently of the template, then just go ahead and double-tap on the thumbnail for that image layer, and it will temporarily disappear. All right, so that's how you trace a horizontal hand. What about a vertical one? Well, I'll go ahead and double-tap on that sketch layer in order to hide it. Then I'll tap on the background to make it active. I'll tap the plus sign at the top of the layers list and hit Image Layer once again. Select on my iPad, switch to the Favorites. And select the vertical hand this time around. Now I'll go ahead and two-finger pitch outside of the hand boundary in order to reduce the size of the canvas. And now I'll two-finger pinch inside the hand. It kind of lurches into position right there. But that's going to allow me to scale and move the hand around until it gets right about there, let's say. I kind of want it to be centered, like so. And then I'll tap the Done button in the top right corner of the screen. All right, now we need a new sketch layer on which to draw. And so I'll tap the plus sign at the top of layer stack once again and select Sketch Layer this time around. And now you can see that the graphite pencil is still selected. So I'll do a quick two-finger pinch in order to center the zoom. I'll tap the double-arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen. And I'll go ahead and lay my actual hand. You'll just have to imagine this part. Well, it's easier to imagine when I'm messing things up. So I'll do another two-finger pinch, a quick one. And there I accidentally drew a line. I don't want that. So we'll undo that. And this time, I'll try to lay my hand down a little more gently so that I'm touching the screen without scaling the template. And then I'll just go ahead and trace around my hand, like so. Now, I'm trying to keep the pencil, the Apple Pencil, in this case, straight up and down. Because that way, you're going to get the best definition if you are just tracing along the edges of your hands and finger and so forth. Singular hand, multiple fingers, that is to say. And then we end up getting this effect here, which is a little bumply and wobbly, but that's okay. And then I'll just go ahead and paint in the missing details. So you are going to have some gaps here and there, if you're working along with my in Sketch, anyway. There might be other applications that do a better job of this. And I'm going to go ahead and move the outside edge of my hand, like so. And I might bring in the inside edge, or maybe not. I might actually kind of like the way it was, in which case, you can undo in the full-screen mode by doing a two-finger drag to the left inside Sketch once again. And then I might add a little bit of extra definition to the thumb, because after all, the thumb is going to be the turkey's head. All right, now I'll go ahead and bring back the interface by tapping that double-arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen. And I'll switch to the eraser at the bottom of the list. That's that checkerboard pattern. And now I'll go ahead and paint away the front of the thumb right here, maybe smooth things out a little bit as well, and then paint down into this region of the thumb. And now I'll go ahead and erase away the right edge, the bad right edge of the hand here, like so. And I might add a few more details with the graphite pencil. So I'll go ahead and select it. And I'll just draw a few crease lines to give the hand a little bit of additional form. All right, so we'll draw a few little wrinkles right there, let's say. And I want to draw a line coming into the palm and another one going over to this region here that more or less defines the wrist. And now, just so that we can see the hand that I've drawn independently of the real hand, I'll go ahead and double-tap on that image layer at the bottom of the stack in order to hide it. And now I'll tap the double-arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen in order to switch to the full-screen mode. And that is how you trace around your actual hand, your right hand if you're left-handed like me, and your left hand if you're a member of the oppressive right-handed majority, in my case, using Adobe Photoshop Sketch, running on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. But you can use a Wacom tablet, or really, anything you like, such as an actual piece of paper with an actual graphite pencil.

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