Since my job description reads, among other things, “Draws pictures all day,” I often have to be my own model. (This is a common problem for artists—I once shared a studio with a seriously talented comic book artist, and I remember frequently turning around to find him suddenly shirtless and drawing himself in a mirror balanced precariously on one knee.) For the most part, this works out fine, but hands are a tricky business—especially when you need to draw both hands at once, and you need one to operate a pencil.

Since I’m currently working on the illustrations for a cookbook being published this year by the Tacoma Community House, I’m drawing a whole lot of hands lately. Hands carrying dishes, maneuvering chopsticks, folding samosas, kneading dough, etc. And since I had the lovely Zooey here, I decided to enlist her as hand model.

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We spent a couple of afternoons shooting reference photos. Zooey rolled and unrolled pretend spring rolls made of fabric and made “samosas” with a scrap of denim. We took turns ripping a baguette to shreds for the camera (to mix up the hand anatomy, y’know), and mimed with nearly every dish in the house, just in case.

One thousand and nineteen photos later, I was satisfied I’d have enough to go on. We made a mess of the bread, but my illustrations are better and Zooey has some pretty unique on-the-job training under her belt.

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In other news, I did a little website tweaking over the weekend. My “commissions” page felt clunky, so I imploded it and replaced it with an F.A.Q. (I prefer to pronounce it “Fack.”) If you ever wondered what I mean about half the things I say around here (and judging by the volume of questions I get on a nearly daily basis, you might), go and check it out here—it’s a whopper.

It ended up being a lot of fun to write (less fun to engineer, although I feel like a complete rock star for actually figuring out the coding all by myself!), because I got to play the part of the snarky interrogator (not that I get many of those, but it’s fun to write like one). I did practice some restraint, however; I was tempted to include a question I get more often than I’d like to admit: “Wait, aren’t you a guy?” True story. Sigh.

Also in the running was “Will you print 1000 coffee mugs with ‘World’s Number One Dad’ for me?” Because I really did get that email once, along with quite a few others mistaking my business for something entirely different. Maybe this will clear things up just a bit…