My Hands (Solo)

[Maya Frostfawn]

Timestamp: Fall 34, 523 AV The day was young and the sun was bright. It hung high in the sky, somewhere beyond her shoulder, the door, the window. Its golden rays filtered through the dusty window, giving each a yellow cast, making the dust motes that swirled through the air all around her sparkle. It was more than enough light to both see and work by, so Maya decided to practice her drawing some more since she had some time to spare. She began her practice by setting her book of blank paper, quill, and vial of ink down on the table before her, before making herself comfortable at the table and opening the vial of ink to the air. From there, she flipped her book open to a blank page with which to work, patted the page down with her hands so it wouldn't shut while she was working, before reaching for her quill and dipping it in the ink. Today, she had decided she would try drawing her hand. Not only because she hadn't tried to draw one before and thought it might be interesting, but because it was something she had before her. Her hand was attached to her after all, something she could look at whenever she wished and base her drawing upon. Something she had never bothered with before, always having drawn from memory or based upon her whims. Once the black ink had ceased dripping from the base of her quill, she pulled the tip out of the vial of ink and prepared to draw. The nuit assumed it would be easiest to draw her hand if she traced its length before going back to add in the details, like her nails, her knuckles, the texture of her dry skin. So, she set her left hand, which she wasn't using to hold the quill, down upon the page. She put it down in the center of the page, so her wrist had room to trail away from it, and she had room to work around it. Not a ton, but it should be enough for relative comfort, she felt. She set her fingers apart from each other as well, as much as the page would allow, to make the process of tracing her hand easier, she hoped. Then, she set her quill down to the right side of her wrist, and began drawing her quill around the length of her hand. She moved slowly, but without any grace, moving her quill's point around her fingers, one by one, the feather tickling her skin as it brushed against it, the quill's point scratching the paper beneath it, leaving a trail of dark ink in its wake as Maya worked, the quill's point nudging her skin as though it were trying to instruct a dog to roll over. Gradually, she made her way around, finished all of her fingers, and began to bring her quill back to her side for the final time. She was finding the angle difficult to work with, her ink running low, so she refreshed it quickly before working on the tracing from the other side of her hand, inching the quill around to the left side of her left hand as opposed to trying to work around it from the right side. The quill scratched against the paper, finishing its inky trail within a few moments. When Maya had finished her tracing, she carefully pulled the quill away from the paper and set it into the vial so its ink could be refreshed, before carefully lifting her hand off the paper so as not to smudge the fresh ink she had lain with the quill's assistance. She managed to remove her hand from the paper without incident, and set it down on the page she wasn't working on, to help keep the book in place while she was finishing up her drawing. Raising her hand had revealed her tracing, and she took a moment to study it. While she could easily discern it was meant to be a hand because she had just attempted to trace it and it was in the relative shape of a human hand, there were a few problems with it. First, it was sloppy. Some of her fingers were far more slender than others, which although true to nature, wasn't quite as extreme as what had been depicted upon the page. As she moved her quill around her fingers earlier, she must have pushed too far under the appendage in some areas, and kept the quill's point to its side like a loyal companion in others, causing the fingers width to vary widely. She hoped it was something she could correct by adding more details into the drawing later, but she wasn't entirely sure. Their length seemed to have experienced a similar issue, and her wrist, while the most natural looking, seemed a tad too slender to support the weight of the hand that wrested upon it. Maya blinked at her work; she had a lot of work ahead of her if she wanted to make this hand seem natural. Word Count: 849 Words

[Maya Frostfawn]

Maya decided that she would begin by adjusting the fingers of her drawing to make them appear more natural than they did currently. To accomplish these particular feat, she decided to take a moment to study her hand. Her thumb was a little chunky, so she thought she might be able to thin it out with some shadow work. She was still learning how to draw and wasn't quite sure how to make this work, but realized she needed to not only practice, but start somewhere and see how her experience went. So, she drew a line that followed the general shape of the thumb a fraction of an inch to the inside of the line that she had drawn to define her finger earlier. When she was done drawing this line along the inside of the thumb, she drew a series of shorter lines spanning from that line to the edge of the thumb's tracing. They reached diagonally upward, like a leave's veins, stretching toward the upper edge of the page. She kept the lines closely bunched together, but didn't press down as roughly on the page as she could have with her quill, to try and keep the page from becoming too dark, a broken mess, and to try and create the illusion of light between the lines. To make it seem more like a shadow as opposed to something she was coloring in on a whim. While not perfect because of how dark she had made some lines in comparison to others, one could tell that she was aiming for a shadow, even if it wasn't a well depicted one. Next, Maya moved onto correcting her index finger, which was a touch too long. She tried to correct the error in a similar method as she had the thumb, by adding some shading, and shadow toward the top of the appendage. It didn't work out as well as it had with her thumb, but it was something. From there, she moved onto her middle finger, which was wobbly and a touch thin. For this one, she simply added another line that roughly followed the path of the first to the outside of the first, widening the finger a bit. She didn't add any shadow or shading to it, however. She wasn't sure how to correct it further, just yet. For now, it seemed like she had just made a second line when she realized her mistake, (which she had), and couldn't correct the first with an erasure for she lacked the skill or the materials or both. She would simply have to live with the error for now until she figured out a way to fix it. Next came her ring finger, which she thought it might be nice to add a simple ring too later, although she lacked one. This finger's outer edge was a touch wobbly, even though it was closest in width and height to her actual finger. For this, she simply tried to add another line that would indicate where her finger's edge would be, while being less wobbly. She had some success, but this wound up creating a sloppy series of lines. So, she traced back over the two lines until they connected, and became one thick line, unlike the others. The last finger Maya made basic corrections to was her pinky, which was a bit too short. She managed this particular feat by adding what appeared to be roughly half an oval to the top of her finger in order to elongate it. She was hoping she could "fix" the mess she had made with the finger's original outline by combining it with the line that would form her nail. She might have made the lines too far from each other, and would have to make the upper part of the nail, the darker part people tended to clip, much thicker and longer than it actually was in real life in order to amend the issue this way. This didn't seem like much of a problem to her, so after refreshing the ink on her quill, Maya set about adding in the roughly oblong outline of her nail to the top of her pinky. She connected the two separate lines she had made to indicate the edge of her pinky together by simply coloring the space between them in, in all the space that could represent a thick nail. It was a bit too long, something she definitely would have clipped had the drawing been real, but it would do. With the first nail done, Maya quickly set about adding in the others with various degrees of success. Mostly, she made them a bit too small, or a little more angular, (closer to a rectangle), than rounded and more oblong in shape. She corrected this by rounding the edges of those that were more angular in shape with quick, rounded stokes of the quill to the corners of those nails. And by coloring things in. When she stopped to survey her work, she realized it wasn't perfect, but it was an improvement over what she had had before, and decided to continue with the practice of depicting her hand so as not to disrupt the flow of her work. Word Counter: 878 Words

[Maya Frostfawn]

To continue her work, Maya decided that she would finish adding the details of her fingers into her drawing before moving on to the back of her hand as well as the wrist. And then, if the piece seemed incomplete or off, she could go back and work on the imperfections and add in other fun details around the hand to help balance the piece. With that in mind, Maya looked down at the back of her hand, taking a moment to study both its structure and the dry nature of her skin. What she realized, however, is that in addition to her nails, which she had already captured, there were a few little details she needed to capture in order to complete her fingers. First, the two bends that divided her fingers into three parts, the lines fanning around their central joint that looked like a ripple on freshly disturbed water, or a series of wrinkles against an old man's skin. And if she squinted, and looked really closely, she noticed a few delicate, errant hairs similar to those that were scattered about the rest of her hand. She decided that she would begin to add in the details of her fingers, by adding the lines that surrounded her finger's lower joint. What she realized as she continued to study her finger was that there was a line at their heart, another two surrounding it on each side, and then some far fainter lines that surrounded those on either side, which gradually faded away into nothingness, additional dry skin and the occasional hair. To assist in placing the lines, Maya moved her hand back toward her drawing, placing the thumb beside where she had outlined it earlier. She squinted, studying her thumb a moment, before finding the central line in the whorl of lines that marked their center. She placed her quill in the air above that line, then moved her quill over to her drawing, so it would be in the same position on the drawing. She then added the line to the proper space, before repeating the process with the remaining, clearly visible lines that divided her finger roughly in half. Each line that moved away from the central was wobbly, and delicately curved, to mirror that on her hand. When she was done adding these lines into her drawing in a deep, black ink, the nuit refreshed the ink on her quill. Then she studied her finger again for a moment, before moving her hand back to its previous position so she could continue her work. From there, she carefully added in the remaining lines she could see on her thumb. The far fainter ones she really had to squint to make out. When she was finished, she studied her work, and to help correct the wobbly nature of some of the lines she had drawn earlier, went back over them with her quill to help hide the imperfections, rendering the lines uneven, for some were thicker than others. Even so, it looked better, she felt. With this thought in mind, the nuit continued her work, by carefully scratching the fainter lines into her remaining fingers after studying her model for some time. When sh was done, she moved inward, taking the time to add a series of thicker lines than the previous that would depict the folds of skin that marked the lower joint on each of her fingers, pinky, index, ring, and middle. As had been the case with her thumb, some of the lines were wobbly, so she went back over them with her quill to help correct the imperfections, rendering some of them thinner than others. When she was done, she realized that something was missing, and after scrutinizing her hand for quite some time, she realized that there was a line that cut through the others, the lines that divided the appendage in half, on three of her five fingers. This line appeared on the pinky, index, and middle, but not the ring or thumb. On the pinky, the line was diagonal, and extended a bit past the final fold on the left-hand size, as it inched upward and toward the right side of her finger. The one on the index was relatively straight, and only cut through the line just below the central from the central, which was its starting point. And the line on her index finger extended from one outer fold to the other, in a relatively straight line. Maya quickly scratched these into her drawing, and satisfied that that portion of her hand was correct, added a few faint lines to represent hairs here and there before deciding that she was ready to move onto the depiction of the back of her hand. Word Count: 796 Words

[Maya Frostfawn]

As Maya decided to move on, she set her quill into the vial of ink so she could take some time to study the back of her hand. What she realized was that a number of things were visible through her pale and sickly skin--her veins, which no longer pumped or even moved blood, her knuckles, and the outline of her bones. She decided she would begin her work by drawing both her knuckles and the outline of her bones, since those wove together in various portions of the back of her hand. So, she picked up her quill again, waited for the ink to cease dripping off its tip. When it had, she added a pair of lines to her drawing, which ran diagonally from her pinky toward her wrist, they were only a fraction of an inch apart. Then, she repeated the process with her remaining fingers; they were each given a pair of lines which ran from their length toward her narrow wrist. From there, she refreshed the ink on her quill before defining her knuckles, which were the only other bones she could see poking against her pale skin. They were all roughly oblong knots in the folds of her skin, which she depicted by adding an oval within the upper portion of each of the pairs of lines she had drawn before. To further differentiate them from the bone that lay beneath, she added some shading lines that hugged their sides. From there, she realized, the lines she had drawn to depict the bones she could see just underneath the surface of her dry skin were too dark, and too unnatural. To make them appear more natural, more like a part of her hand as opposed to a mistake within a larger picture of a drawing of a hand, she added a series of straight lines, of varying length branching from the line that stretched from the right side of her pinky toward the center of her hand. They were drawn close together to create a shadow. Another series were added to both sides of the bone lines that came out of her index, middle, and ring fingers. While she only added these shading lines to the bone line on the inside of her thumb, the side closest to the rest of her fingers. When she was done adding all of these lines that depicted wavering shadows, natural dips within her skin, she took a moment to study her hand, and realized that the shading looked a little dark and funky, but she wasn't sure how to fix it, so, she'd have to leave it for now. From there, she refreshed the ink on her quill and took a moment to study how her veins wove through her pale skin, over and under each of her bones. Around her knuckles. How they coursed from the top of her hand to the bottom, toward her slender wrists. After she had studied them for awhile, she came to the conclusion that they had no true pattern, from what she could tell. Although, none moved in a straight line; they always moved in wavy patterns or at the very least, diagonally from one portion of her body to another. The first vein Maya added was defined by a pair of lines, which ran perpendicularly from one another. It stretched from the knuckle of her pinky, gently diagonally toward her wrist. The next from the knuckle of her index finger in a gentle wave toward the knobby bone on her wrist. There was a fork she added to the bump of its wave, which cut between the middle and index knuckles. Another vein ran in a wave from between her middle and ring finger knuckles down toward her wrist, before cutting toward the vein she had drawn in their previously. Oddly enough, she couldn't see any around her thumb. As she set her quill down for a moment to study her work, she realized she couldn't tell the difference between her veins, and the lines meant to depict bone, so she quickly colored them in. That helped define them a little, but her hand definitely didn't look like that. And she couldn't figure out why. What was wrong. After a moment, she realized she was missing her fine hairs and quickly added a few quick strokes of ink into her drawing, but that wasn't enough, something was still wrong. She just didn't know what it was or how to fix it, just that her art was off. Since she wasn't sure how to fix it, however, she decided to just move on to her wrist and the rest of her drawing. She knew she'd just learn to fix her mistakes with practice and the build-up of knowledge she didn't currently possess. Word Count: 802 Words

[Maya Frostfawn]

Although the main focus of her drawing, its central point, was her hand, the wrist was an important part of the composition Maya needed to finish before adding in any final details. The wrist seemed a lot simpler in nature than the hand. It had a lot less going on than the hand, and she felt it should be easier to draw and take her less time to depict than the hand had. Its largest features were the fine hairs that lined her skin, a tiny freckle from which a few hairs sprouted, a pair of veins that ended toward the beginning of its expanse, and the knobby bone on one side of the wrist. She decided she would begin by getting the easiest things out of the way. Thus, she began by extending some of the veins she had drawn earlier into the upper portion of her wrist. The extension was perhaps a quarter of an inch in length. And to mark them, she colored each in before replenishing the ink upon her drying quill. After another moment, she continued her drawing by placing a small circle on the right side of her wrist, to represent the freckle that existed upon her flesh in real life. Next came the knobby bone. She created this by drawing a rough circle on the side of her hand that held the pinky. The outline of the circle was lighter on one side than the other, and this was entirely intentional. She hoped it would make it easier to hide the outline she had created. From there, Maya began to add in some shading, to create the illusion of shadow along the far side of the bone, to hopefully create a sense of depth. She thought it was depth anyway. In any case, she wanted to make the bone look like it was coming out toward her a bit, like it was three-dimensional as opposed to flat. She created this illusion by adding a series of quick lines around the far side of the bone. All close together, of mildly shifting lengths. All straight and angled out from the bone toward the hand itself. While these lines did help to make the bone seem three-dimensional, Maya realized it was hard to tell what she had been going for when she stopped to survey her work and replenish the ink upon her quill. She hoped that adding in the fine hairs would help, as would any final details. Thus, she began to add tiny, little wispy lines to her skin. Adding fine hairs to the length of her wrist, a few more to her hand as well. When she was done, she set her quill down in her vial of ink and studied her work again. It was sloppy, busy. Not what she'd consider to be a good drawing. Just someone's desperate and failed attempt at depicting a hand with any degree of accuracy, and of course, well. Had she still been alive, she might have sighed, but she was no longer alive. Pouting a little. She drew a circle to the right of her hand. It wasn't perfectly round by any means. In fact, most of its outline was a bit on the wobbly side, but she ignored it as she quickly added a series of ovals to the drawing. They all stemmed from that circle, and weren't perfect ovals, for their ends had been cut off by the circle she had drawn earlier. It was a lousy doodle of a flower with long, oblong petals, like a daisy. She absently colored one of the petals in. That left four uncolored, just outlined in black. The next she drew a line through the center, running from one end of the petal to the other. Then on one side, she drew lines jutting out of the central line toward the edge of the petal, as though half of it were cast in shadow while the other half was not. The next petal, she lazily added stripes to. They ran up and down, in a zig-zag pattern from one side of the narrow petal to the other. The next she added large dots to, simply because she was bored. The last she left blank because she had run out of bright ideas. When Maya set her quill down she studied her little flower. It was one of the strangest things she had ever seen. Incoherent. Nothing quite fit together. She closed her vial of ink so it would not dry out or spill. Closed the book. Drawing was something she'd have to master another day. For now, she had other things to do. Word Count: 778 Words