starting a fad No, I'm not. Just trying out a little idea I had on the spur of the moment. Idle hands. . .

You know how, back in preschool, they had you trace out your hand on a piece of construction paper or whatever? The hand-tracing thing is such a basic staple of the human learning process, I bet you any kid would do it spontaneously even if they'd never been shown the concept. Or at least, short of tracing their hand, they'd naturally discover the archetypal appeal of the handprint.

I don't think of myself as an artist or a visionary. Even if this were to become a fad (which it won't), it wouldn't be because my idea is so fresh and clever, but perhaps because of the way it taps into something primal in human consciousness. And even that's a stretch.

OK, here's what I did:

This was done by the same method as those preschool tracings, with only a slight twist. I literally laid my hand on the screen of my laptop and traced it in Photoshop (MSPaint would be equally capable) using the mouse. The challenge, of course, lies in keeping the hand position and viewing angle constant while simultaneously guiding the brush with enough precision to produce an acceptably accurate silhouette. The experience is quite exhilarating, actually. One could obviously achieve a much cleaner outcome with much more variety of hand postures much more easily by simply tracing digital photos, but that would completely miss the point of doing it this way. The oddly mediated tactile-technological intimacy, the self-discovery aspect, would devolve into a mere mechanical exercise.

I'm not an expert on computer displays, but I'm pretty sure different screens, even at the same resolution and DPI, will show the full-sized image at slightly different scales. That's unfortunate and pretty much kills the natural social outgrowth of this idea, comparing your own hand to someone else's tracing -- but then, I'm not starting a fad, am I?

I thought it was fun. You might as well give it a try if you've got the time on your hands. What say?

<o> <o>