Drawing Hands #4: Practice and Forms

This may seen obvious, but the best way to get better at drawing hands is to draw a bunch of them. Plan on making hand drawing a part of your daily practice, or maybe your warm up routine. It will pay off!

I have trouble using my own hand for reference because in most cases what I can see of my hand is not in the position that I want be drawing it. (I don’t do any “first person” shots). Fortunately, hand reference from artists is easy to find, such as this one from Tom Richmond:

However, if you want to get good at drawing hands, you’ll want to look for photos of actual hands and use those. Then, you can work on making them fit your style. This one has a nice mix of basic and dynamic hands:

So what do we do when we draw a hand from reference? We go back to the basic forms I discussion in my hand anatomy post and start finding shapes. I’m going to use this hand, which isn’t part of the above reference photos, but gives us a good opportunity to practice.

First, lets examine the basic shapes here. One of the best skills I picked up as an artist is to find the shapes within the complexity and work from those.

You’ll find the square the represents the palm, and notice that the fingers obey that natural curve we discussed in the first Drawing Hands post.

You’ll also notice the fleshy part, and also that you can bundle the two middle fingers together to fake three fingers.

Now that I’ve noticed the general shape of everything, I’m going to sketch the basic shapes. I round off the square of the palm and indicate where the fingers will go. (I’m a lefty. That’s why I put it on the left side.)

Now I’ll add the fingers, paying attention to the length of the fingers and removing a knuckle as I discussed in the Simplifying Hands post.

I noticed that the hand seems stretched out (not always a bad thing), some I’n going to go a little resizing before I do the final.

And then I’ll go over it in ink and try to cartoon it up a bit.

I realized when I started drawing this hand that I’ve never really drawn a hand in this position before, so I’d probably take another crack it before I included it in my work. And the hand position isn’t quite a duplicate of the photo, but the goal here was never an exact representation.

And above all do NOT use AI hands for reference!

Hey! My second graphic novel, Checkups, Shots, and Robots comes out on November 12th! If you want to preorder it, that would be awesome!