I Could Not Draw Hands So I Stopped Drawing People

It was the hands. It is always the hands.

You could do a face, more or less. You could do a shoulder and the fall of a sleeve. And then you would get to the end of the arm and everything would go wrong at once, and what came out looked like a bunch of something rather than a hand.

So you started putting them in pockets.

That is where it begins, and it is such a small, sensible adjustment that nobody would call it avoidance. Hands in pockets. Hands behind the back. Hands out of frame, hands under a table, a figure holding a cup so only the outside shows.

And then, without any decision anywhere, the poses got fewer. And then the people got further away. And then they were figures in the distance, which do not need hands. And then they were landscapes with a figure, and then landscapes.

And then you stopped drawing.

I want to point at the shape of that, because I think you have never seen the whole arc laid out and I think it explains something that has felt like a mystery.

You did not lose interest. Nothing dramatic happened. You made one reasonable adjustment to avoid one hard thing, and then the territory the adjustment allowed got smaller each year, until the room it left you was too small to stand up in.

That is what avoidance does. It never takes the thing you are avoiding. It takes everything next to it.

I was afraid, and went and hid it

There is a servant in one of the parables who does something everybody understands, and the reason he gives is worth reading carefully, because it is not laziness.

Three servants get money to work with. Two of them go out and trade. The third one does something very careful.

And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. (Matthew 25:25, King James Version)

I was afraid, and went and hid it.

He did not spend it on himself. He did not lose it. He protected it perfectly, and he can produce it, intact, on the day. His argument is that nothing was damaged.

And the thing worth seeing is that his instinct was risk management. Bury it, and it cannot go wrong. That is not a fool's logic. That is exactly the logic of hands in pockets.

You are not being scolded for cowardice, and Matthew 25:25 puts fear rather than laziness at the root of the hiding. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a parable about a buried coin and lays it on a sketchbook that went from faces to landscapes to nothing.

And notice the shape of his loss. He did not lose the coin. He lost every year it could have been in use.

You have not lost the ability, and it is already settled in the written word that what the fearful servant lost was the using rather than the thing. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who still has all of it and has not put a pencil to paper in years.

The avoiding is the cost

Now let me stay with the arc, because this is the part I want you to carry out of here.

Every adjustment you made was individually sensible. Hands in pockets is a legitimate compositional choice and people who draw for a living do it constantly. Nothing in that list was wrong on the day you did it. The quality of a hand on a page is not a measure of the woman holding the pencil.

But an adjustment made to avoid something has to be made again the next time, and each one narrows the ground a little, and none of the narrowings announce themselves. By the time the territory is too small, there is no single decision anywhere to point at, which is why it has felt like a mystery.

And what you drew was never a measure of you. Not the good faces and not the bad hands. A hand that comes out like a bunch of something is a hand that a person has not drawn enough times yet, and that is a fact about repetitions rather than about a person.

You are not disqualified by one thing you cannot do, and heaven has never once let a single weakness close a whole territory. Matthew 25:25 shows the loss coming through the hiding rather than through the failing, and the Spirit of God is the one who names the mechanism rather than blaming the woman.

And do not go and learn hands properly first. Do not find a course, do not do forty studies, do not decide the way back in is to fix the thing. That accepts the whole premise, which is that hands had to be solved before people could be drawn.

You have permission to draw a hand badly tonight, and this is yours: the way back is straight through the thing rather than around it. It is written in Matthew 25:25 that fear did the burying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes with a woman into the exact thing she has been going around for eleven years.

Twenty minutes, and one hand

So here is the ask, and it is deliberately the worst possible one.

Tonight, draw a hand. Twenty minutes. Your own left hand on the table in front of you, with a pencil and whatever paper is in the house.

Do not draw a person with a hand. Do not warm up with a face first. Straight to the hand.

You are going straight at the buried thing tonight, and Matthew 25:25 names fear rather than laziness as what put it in the ground. The Holy Spirit is the one who goes into the exact difficulty a person has walked around for eleven years.

It will be terrible. There is no version of this where it is not terrible, because a hand is genuinely one of the hardest things and yours has not been attempted in a decade. The fingers will be wrong lengths and the thumb will sit in the wrong place and the whole thing will look like a bunch of something.

Keep it on the page. Do not erase it, do not turn the page and try again, do not tear it out.

You are covered while the worst drawing of your life sits there, and Matthew 25:25 is the ground under that. The written word shows a man who protected something perfectly and lost the use of it, and the Spirit of God is present at a table with a bad hand on a page.