Round one of my art competition is all about the thing that humbles every artist eventually: hands. I put three artists on a 40-minute clock to illustrate a dynamic hand pose using a wooden hand mannequin as reference, and everybody had to use vine charcoal and a kneaded eraser. There were three poses to choose from, and the choices alone tell you a lot—one felt “biblical” like it belonged in a Renaissance painting, another screamed Spider-Man, and the last one was the problem child with way more foreshortening. The real battle here wasn’t “can you draw a hand,” it was “can you control perspective, value, and structure when the fingers start coming at the viewer.” We talk process mid-drawing: starting with perspective, staying loose with vine charcoal, and even doing a study-page approach with the same pose from different angles. One artist even double-checked mannequin inaccuracies by switching between the wooden model and their own actual hand pose. By the end, the big takeaway is simple: palms are usually manageable, but fingers in perspective are where drawings go to die—unless you slow down, measure, and build it intentionally.