story of "the hand of feelings"

So I am one of those weirdos who really actually enjoys drawing hands. With pretty much every other artist I've ever talked to, you either love them or hate them, but I have found that the majority of people don't like doing them. And to be fair, they can be difficult, and when you are drawing more than one, making them seem like they belong together is really stressful. But for whatever reason, I am lucky enough to be one of those people who is like "YES HANDS I SHALL DRAW HANDS" all the time. It's my go-to thing to sketch when I don't know what to work on - I've always got them on me for reference! And when I am having a lot of feelings and emotions, I tend to gravitate towards hands and roots (I will get to that in a different post). Now. The "hand of feelings".

I drew this at the tail end of April this year, and it is actually one of my favorite pieces that I have done. But the day that I was working on it, I was Very Stressed. There were a combination of things happening in my life at that time. Nothing was SUPER dramatic, but to me for whatever reason, that day everything felt the most dramatic. I was stressed about one of my jobs (my day job, not the fun martial arts one), I had moved kind of recently and it was a really good thing for me but that doesn't mean that there's not Feelings and Emotions involved, there were some small things going on with my family that were stressful, and there were a few other personal things going on that were just all building up slowly. And for whatever reason, this day I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed and pulled in different directions and also just sort of... held back? Long story short, I was stressed. Was I being over-dramatic? Maybe. But at the time it all felt very big and important, and I didn't know how to articulate how I was feeling but I wanted to express it SOMEHOW. And this was the best way that I knew how. I am happy to say that I am no longer in this really dramatic emotional place - honestly it probably lasted for all of three days before I balanced out and got back to normal haha. But the art that came out of it, I think, is pretty cool.