Re-creating M.C. Escher's famous work: "Drawing Hands"
Escher's fascinating mind and why I love his works
"Drawing Hands” is a lithograph made by M.C. Escher in 1948. It is an example of what author Douglas Hofstadter has called a 'strange loop,' a paradoxical system which continuously self-referentially repeats with no seeming beginning or end.1
I think that when trying to represent our 3D universe on a piece of paper, a mathematically well-founded artwork is much more pleasing to the eye than a not-calculated work. Our eyes tend to catch and judge proportions in a visual image, so the better we use the proportions on the paper, more convincing our work will be. What I love about Escher’s work is that he mathematically represents his imagination so well that his drawings almost seem real.
One of the reasons why Escher’s work “Drawing Hands” seem so real is that there is a high contrast between the lightest shade of gray and darkest shade of grey. When we use a wide variety of shades in a mathematically well-proportioned drawing, the drawing will look the most realistic.
I have been trying to build an artistic portfolio, and for one of its works, my art teacher gave me the assignment of creating a greyscale and a gradient. The grayscale had to contain 10 possible shades of a 2B pencil, and the gradient had to contain all tones in the grayscale:
Gradient means that there has to be a continuous transition from the dark shades to light shades, accomplishing that with a single pencil was hard, but I can promise that it is a great practice to have more control over the pencil. For the rest of the paper, I had to draw something that would contain all 10 shades on the grayscale. I was already a fan of Escher’s work, because to me his works have very interesting ideas like strange paradoxical systems, and I think his mathematical accuracy of imitating the world to make his own reality is fascinating. I decided to copy one of his most famous works, drawing hands:
After a couple days of hard work, I finished the drawing. I am actually proud of this drawing, because the original is very detailed, and hands are already a complicated subject, so completing it with high accuracy was a success for me.
Almost all of Escher’s works represent his fascination for geometry and mathematics. Mathematics is at the very fabric of the universe, my art teacher always tells us to see proportions and angles first, because that is how we represent a real thing, whether it be an organic or an industrial form. I think that Escher’s work “Drawing Hands” represents the beauty of mathematics, and how closely tied it is to our world by using a form that is so familiar to us: The hands.
“M.C. Escher's ‘Drawing Hands.’” Museum of Art (MOA), Museum of Art (MOA), 5 Oct. 2022, moa.byu.edu/m-c-eschers-drawing-hands/.