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Preventing hand injuries from digital art

I got a question about drawing injuries, and I typed up a pretty lengthy response so I wanted to share it here as well.

I get asked a lot about hand strains and injuries, and it is something most artists have to face one time or another just because we work so hard for our dreams. I personally don’t get strains or injuries, both for art and for piano playing when I still majored in it, two main creative paths where hand/arm injuries are common. My hands rarely feel tired and when they do, I stop drawing. So when I get asked, I usually can only offer the fact that you can find a lot of carpal tunnel exercises on google and there’s nothing else I know about relief exercises, other than I find that flinging my hands also help loosen them up a bit.

The most important thing about this issue is actually prevention rather than relief. I would like to believe this approach is what prevented me from getting injured–I’ve never really been a push through the pain type person, and glorifying suffering and pain as a sign of hard work is definitely unhealthy, as those are huge signals from your body telling you to stop. There are many things that I know for sure strains your hands much more than anything else that I will list below, and I believe that, if it is possible for you, the most efficient way to deal with injury is to find out which of these things is the cause and working around it.

The first big cause is posture; if your arms have no support points (ie you have to hold your elbow up with your muscles or tense your wrist to maintain stability) you will strain much easier, just like how you get tired easier standing at an uncomfortable pose vs a well grounded one. So be sure to seat yourself so that you have somewhere to rest your arm while drawing, while your body is at a relaxed angle with full support. For a normal tablet, rest your arm and wrist somewhere on the table or the tablet. For a Cintiq or tablet monitor, try having it upright so that your elbow can rest on your desk, and your wrist can rest on the cintiq screen, and you only need to use your fingers to control the pen.

The second cause is your grip on the pen. This can be caused by your need for precision/speed of repetitive movement/pressure. Line art, or cross hatching, or pressing hard to get the darkness of the brush you need, are all high stress activities that strains your hand much more than, say, rendering or putting down a base painting. Knowing that, you can:

• Use a higher brush opacity or turn off pressure sensitivity for opacity to prevent yourself from having to press really hard to get brush impact you want.
  
• Go to your wacom tablet preferences if you have one, and set the hardness of the brush so that it’s easier to get the brush opacity/size you want. You want to have the problem of having to try to press lighter for lighter lines, rather than having to press harder for darker/thicker lines. The latter strains much more than the former.
  
• If your grip of the pen is too tight purely because the pen is slippery/too small for you/hard to grip, such as old bamboo tablets, there are rubber tablet pen paddings that you can buy online, or you can just use a layer of masking tape all around the grip area to increase friction/grip comfort and make it easier for yourself to hold your pen. A Cintiq or Intuos Pro pen is ideally what you want your pen to feel like: have friction on the surface so your fingers don’t slip, large enough so it rests and takes up space comfortably between your thumb and index fingers without you tensing and curling your hand inwards really hard, and shaped so that your grip is stopped right before the cone of the tip, preventing slipping.
  

The third cause is the schedule of your drawing. This may or may not be possible to change because for a lot of us, a deadline is a deadline. But try to space your tasks so that you cycle between intense, detailed, hand-straining work, and relaxing, loose, more brainstorming work. The latter is excellent for hand rest while still being productive creative work. For example, if you are drawing comic pages, it might make sense in terms of efficiency to sketch 10 pages, then ink 10 pages, then tone 10 pages. But when you are inking those 10 pages consecutively, that’s when you give your hands no rest and your hand will start to hurt a lot, while you have no choice but to push through the pain to get the work done. Instead, try to draw these pages one by one, or have a few drawings at various stages of completion to rotate between. eg. you work on inking drawing A, then when you feel your hands are strained, switch to putting down loose underpainting for drawing B, switch back to inking drawing A, then start brainstorming drawing C and think more/draw less. Give your hands some natural times to rest up with less intense work, and you get work done without having to lose time by having to really stop drawing altogether.

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As tempting as it is to try to feel like you are working as hard as you can to achieve your dreams and aspirations, while feeling guilty about resting/taking the more relaxing route, remember that your hands make your art possible, so treat them well! 

justduet:

if I could get a dollar for every time someone tells me “oh I didn’t know YOU were the artist! I just took your art off google and used it for my phonecase/sticker/stream/whatever”

it really boggles my mind that people try to sell my art as their own too… like wtf dude. i can’t imagine what its like at a convention, do people just seriously nod and say “yeah I drew that”???

o_o

thats why in a lot of conventions, especially conventions that care less about the authenticity of who they put in the artist alley, people have to ask repeatedly “you’re the artist? you drew it? you drew the whole thing?” And let’s not even talk about what the actual merchants in dealer’s room do

I’ve overheard enough conversation of people walking pass the alley saying “these are just all merchants” or people looking at stuff on my table thinking I’m just the cashier, or more outrageously when people ask if I’m the artist, then ask me about the medium, and when I say computer they’d just assume it means taking stuff off the internet and putting it together, forcing me to actually say yes I PAINTED this on the computer with a tablet pen

it depends on the con though cus most anime cons are airtight about only allowing in artists they can verify. Some bigger, non anime cons just take your name and your money and doesn’t care who actually uses your badge and sits behind your table

Make smaller goals

I’ve been getting a lot of questions these days from those setting out to do something big, in the form of “I want to publish a comic and I don’t know where to start” or “I want to make a living with art and I don’t know where to start”

It is certainly logical to not know where to start since making a comic and succeeding in making art into your career are huge tasks that involve a LOT of steps, steps that are not necessarily linear. The problem of making such a general goal like “I want to publish and sell my own comic” is most people think “ok I gotta write a story”, then think “fuck how do I write”, or “ok I’m going to draw some pages”, then think “fuck I can’t draw” and feel stuck.

The solution to that is just to make smaller goals.

If you go to google.com and type in your goal and you can’t find a clear answer, your goal is too big, vague and general. “How do I publish a comic” won’t give you anything helpful unless you already know how to complete the step of “draw a comic”. “How do I make a living from art” won’t give you anything useful unless you already know how to complete the step of “create a diverse portfolio catering to the company you’re applying for”. On the contrary, “how do I do 3 point perspective” or “what file format do I need for offset paperback printing” will give you exactly the answer you need for the goals of learning perspective or printing a book.

If you feel like you don’t know where to start to “learn to draw”, make a smaller and specific goal, “learn to draw a specific thing”, “learn to copy photographs”, “lean to draw young children in a specific style”. If you’re still lost about how to do that, make an even smaller goal of “learning photoshop basics” or “learning lighting and shading” Keep doing this until you know exactly what to look for to get to that one small goal. Focus on that and try your damnest to disspell self deprecating (aka absolutely useless and unproductive and most of the time untrue) thoughts like “it is taking me 2 years to learn to draw and I still need to do ___ _____ ____ and ____ to get to the my end goal, whereas other people just do it so easily, I’m not meant for this”.

Smaller goals do not mean settling for less. Smaller goals do not mean defeatism. Smaller goals do not mean you don’t have what it takes and you should give up while the time is still young. Smaller goals mean clearer vision and better plans.

It’s so easy to make grand final goals and it’s so easy to feel like making a minor goal of “being able to fluently draw the male anatomy” is too insignificant or settling for too little or not cool enough sounding when being asked what your goals are. But in the end you will only be able to work effectively towards the goals you actually are capable of logically seeing a path to.

(this applies to everything by the way, not just art, you’ll notice you already do this for basically everything else in life, it’s just that it’s so much easier for people to feel helpless against these situations when it comes to art)

I don’t like to hear about talented children because behaviours ordinary to them will be hailed on a pedestal as extraordinary, their childhoods will be doomed by their talent, and in the end they’ll grow up to be ordinary people just like you and me anyway.

I do get impressed when I see those things, but after 3 or 4 seconds the impressiveness immediately turns into this incredible dread as if I’m looking at a disaster I cannot stop.

first world problems

to everybody who complains about how unhelpful the advice you get from pros or just generally people who are better than you: do you think they got better because they had much more legitimate help than you? and their failure to show you these tricks is contributing to your failure? If so this is exactly why you feel like you can’t get better. These pros faced the same stupid problems you are facing now and they got the same useless advice from people they looked up to when they were bad. If anything there would be even less resources years back than there are now at their disposal. The only difference is they squeezed useful knowledge as much as they possibly could from those useless advices, and went out of their way to find the rest of the solution themselves, even if it meant taking the time to try things for years only to find out they don’t work. The only thing they have that you don’t have is a healthy attitude, an acceptance that what they do will not always be successful and a willingness to take the chance anyway.

There is always a solution. If you can’t find any, you’re not looking hard enough and you’re not willing enough to make sacrifices and compromises and pour in parts of yourself to make ends meet. It’s fine to feel sad about getting the short end of the stick, but someone else having a good life should NEVER be the reason for your own inability to do your best.

lkrecic asked: You had said that drawing a manga is one of the most unrewarding projects you can bring upon oneself. Could you elaborate more on why that is?

These are just my personal opinions which, as always when it comes to art, are subjective and not backed by known facts/education, so please don’t take the following too much to heart:

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