Drawing Hands 2: My Inspirations
Who I studied to get good at drawing hands when I was learning.
When I first started drawing (and we are talking elementary school here) I didn’t bother too much with hands. For one thing, I wasn’t very good at drawing much of anything, and also I was much more concerned about getting a good likeness of Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear, or other characters I was into then. In my mind I’m sure it was important to get hands right, but I wanted my drawings to be good likenesses first.
But once I started reading MAD Magazine, I had several good hand drawers to look at. There was Wally Wood…
Jack Davis …
And my number one guy, Sergio Aragonés.
I wasn’t really studying the way Sergio drew hands. I was looking at the way that he used gestures. Many of his comics are wordless, and he was adept at body language and hand postures to tell the reader what was going on. In some of his comics, I could actually hear the dialogue in my mind, and that’s why he was so great. We’ll get more from Sergio in future posts.
But no one had an influence on me like Albert Uderzo, the artist on Asterix. When my friend lent me his copy of Asterix and the Normans (in French, no less!) I knew exactly who I wanted to draw like. Here’s a page from that comic:
Perhaps the fact that I was initially exposed to Asterix in French made me pay more attention to the gestures and use of hands than I otherwise would have. But what captivated me most was how Uderzo draw these fairly realistic hands on cartoon people.
Fingernails, knuckles - this was a guy who know how to draw hands. And if you notice, he uses the trick of using two finger joints instead of three, but you don’t really notice. They still look realistic, much more so than you would expect from the rest of Underzo’s work (Asterix and Oberlix have much more cartoony hands). But I had finally found the guy who I wanted to imitate. And I spent obsessive hours copying drawings of his hands in my sketchbook to get a feel for how hands, in Uderzo’s world, worked. Where to put the bends, where the fingernails go, how to draw knuckles well.
And for the early part of my drawing career, this is the path I followed. I think you can see a great deal of Uderzo influence here in these comic summaries from Macbeth from 2010:
Since then, my style has simplified quite a bit. I don’t include the fingernails or knuckles anymore, but I still have a taste for hands that have a bit of definition to them, as you can see from this two page spread from Checkups, Shots, and Robots:
I still like to give the illusion of finger joints, especially when drawing adults. Still in the neighborhood of what Uderzo was doing, but adapted to my current style, which has more influences thrown into the mix, like mid-modern illustration and the work of Harvy Kurtzmann.
I’m going to throw one more guy into the mix: Darwin Cooke. I didn’t follow him until recently, but I love the way he draws hands.
In conclusion, it’s important to find some artists whose drawings speak to you. Who are some of your hand inspirations? I’d love to hear! Leave a comment below.
I really enjoyed your post on drawing hands! Seeing how artists like Uderzo and Aragonés shaped your style was fascinating. Your reflections on the evolution of your technique offer great insight into the artistic process. I recently came across Bill Watterson. His work is still unfamiliar to me, but I really like digging around him at the moment.