Hand Drawn

It was Tuesday. Rain drummed on the skylight above and bathed the office in a soft grey light that the solitary corner lamp fought valiantly to illuminate. I was reviewing hundreds of shots for the film we were delivering. Several million elements bounced around the building; technical, creative, challenging; moving between teams of artists, all bringing the impossible to life. An ordinary day at Animal Logic.

Jason, my EP and ally, piped up, his voice tinged with regret.

“I saw this drawing of a hand I liked the other day… I should have bought it…”.

From that simple wish, this book was born.

As I cycled home through the wet streets of Sydney, the idea of drawing filled my thoughts. It had been a while, and the desire to create these hand illustrations pulled at me. It’s amazing to consider that your hands, in fact, all of your body, are ‘thought guided’, hands are beautifully engineered pieces of technology. You think an esoteric notion, which translates into a signal that communicates to a series of muscle groups that convert your idea into a physical movement. I wanted to capture how hands express our intentions more vividly than any other part of our body.

After dinner, I pulled out a pen and began to scribble. To my dismay, my hand wouldn’t behave, misunderstanding the directions I gave it; more a seismograph than the brilliant execution I had envisioned, but as with everything, persistence paid off. At the end of the night, I had a drawing and had enjoyed every minute of it. I loved the concept of telling a story through extreme close-ups, that the portrait of a hand could say as much or more than a face. Maybe there was more to this idea than the single picture I had so far…

Many late nights of creation and revision followed to bring this, my first book, to light.