Drawing Hands: A Guide to Mastering the Complex Form
01. Looking inside the Hand
The human hand comprises bones, tendons, and lots of connective tissue, plus muscle and fat. It’s a strong and flexible appendage. Getting to know how it’s formed and how it works can really help you learn how to draw hands. It can be helpful to sketch out skeletal studies of human anatomy in general, but when learning how to draw hands, a lot of the form we know is lost at the skeletal level. However, if we overlay a surface view on top of the skeletal view, we can begin to appreciate where the skeleton sits within our hands.
02. Breaking the Hand into Shapes
You can lay in broad shapes over the skeletal view in order to build the hand. Use a flattened wedge-like shape for the palm; rectangles for the digits and a teardrop shape for the thumb. You can use the skeletal image above as the basis for this step. When learning how to draw hands, simplifying the forms like this will help to remove the pressure of rendering out a perfect hand from the start. From here, you can begin to fill out the shapes into 3D forms to help build the hand and pose it in perspective.
03. Building the Hand in 3D
Now it’s time to develop the forms to make the hand drawing feel more 3D. Here, our flattened-wedge palm gains another dimension, as the fingers become cylinders and the joints become spheres. We’ll call this view of the hand the planar view. By drawing through our forms, we can show volume, as you can see in the palm pads.
04. Posing the Shapes
Once you’ve drawn a 3D version of your first hand, why not try out some different poses? By breaking up the hand into simpler forms and using contours to explore volumes, you can start to arrange the hand in different poses without worrying too much about the details.
05. Getting Started with Planes
Once you’ve had some fun with posing, pick out a pose that you like and, using your own hand as a reference, draw the hand in the planar view. In the sketch above, the little cones indicate which way the cylinders are travelling. This can help you to keep a grasp on where the curves of the cylinders need to bend.
06. Finding Gesture and Forms
If you’re working traditionally on paper, be sure to start out light and gradually build up volume and forms with heavier lead only as you get to the end of your study. Meanwhile, if you’re working digitally, you can simply knock back the opacity of the planar drawing here to begin to find the forms you see on your own hand.
07. Beginning to Lay in the Detail
Now you can either push back the first two layers, or switch to a heavier lead to begin to lay in those details. You can see how helpful the construction of both the planar view drawing and the gesture drawing really help us to place details like the wrinkles and creases in the hand.
Conclusion
Drawing hands can feel daunting, but by breaking them down into simple, repeatable rules, you can make the process easier. Remember to simplify the forms, use contours to explore volumes, and build up volume and forms gradually. With practice, you can master the complex form of the hand and create realistic and accurate drawings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I get started with drawing hands?
A: Start by breaking down the hand into simple shapes and use contours to explore volumes.
Q: What is the planar view, and how do I use it?
A: The planar view is a 2D representation of the hand, which helps you to build up volume and forms. Use it as a guide to find the forms you see on your own hand.
Q: How do I add detail to my hand drawing?
A: Start by building up volume and forms gradually, and then add details like wrinkles and creases.
