Fingers and thumbs

After drawing my brother's portrait I couldn't decide what I wanted to draw next. A great pose like that doesn't come along often and another portrait would probably be disappointing but I'd love to do more. I also need to draw more varied objects just to find out my limitations with colour pencils. So I dithered and eventually came back to this photo I found a couple of weeks ago when I was going through the albums. I took this photo of Paul and Alex's hands about 10 years ago with the intention of drawing them but I never got around to it. You could say I drew this while I was dithering, however it was still practice. Paul and Alex's hands are quite different in texture and tone so while Paul's hand (below) was easy - mostly Yellow Ochre and English Red - Alex's skin is cooler and I had difficulty with the shadows. I tried Sienna Natural for the base instead of Yellow Ochre but switched back to warm it up, and Red Brown for shading but it looked a little 'dirty'. Blue Grey may have been a better choice. There are probably other combinations that I will come to like but for now I rather like the combination of Yellow Ochre and English Red (a brick red). I put them in my bag this week for sketching on the trams and every time I was in one it was either empty (!) or everyone was dressed in black and grey! The Swiss love their black winter clothes so I'll twiddle my thumbs a while longer...