DRAWING HANDS

How to Draw Hands

Drawing hands can be difficult. Extremely difficult. Perhaps the main reason is because we don't pay enough attention to hands. When drawing a human representation, we tend to focus on drawing the face because let's face it - facial features are much more interesting in terms of its aesthetics.

Attempting to draw hands can be overwhelming. Especially the fingers. I don't know how many times I've drawn the hands and messed up the fingers. When you encounter this sort of problem with your own drawings, don't be discouraged. Practice is all it takes. Practice and patience.

Above are roughly four guidelines to help break down this "overly complex" part of our human body. 

I have represented the shape of the palm in a trapezium shape. However, when drawing the human figure, avoid using straight lines. Straight lines can look geometric, therefore use slightly curved lines to achieve a natural look to this part of the human figure. As seen on the diagram above, I have created a better version of the trapezium shape of the palm, replaced by the broken lines. The diagonal broken line represents how the hand folds as it moves. If you touch your little finger and your thumb, you can notice an invisible line from the fore finger to the wrist.

The broken lines represent the joints of the fingers. Note that this does no include the thumb. There should be four broken lines starting from the top curve of the pink trapezium. Notice how where the pinky or little finger is located, the blue lines descend to a point, and where the fore finger is located, the lines are parallel to each other. I have added the circles to further represent the joints for the fingers and thumb. The length of the middle finger should be roughly the same as the size of the palm.

Finally, elongated ovals were used to represent the fingers and the thumb. This was easily done by connecting the blue circles together.

This tutorial only covers the basics of drawing hands extending and somewhat relaxed. Bending or clenching the hand is a different story and more complex.

Below is my first step-by-step of how I used the guidelines to draw to very simple hand gestures.