Hey guys.. so I've been thinking for a while to share with you how i draw and paint hands..

 

Sometimes hands can be very difficult to draw them and I get the frustration because I've been in your shoes years ago.. So today we're going to be learning how we can draw decent hands and learn some techniques and exercise.

 

Alright.. we're going to look first at the anatomy of a hand and how the bones are structured. Now I wouldn't require from you to know every bone and it's names, so all we need to understand is how the metacarpal is shaped and phalanx.

 

I've added an x-ray hand with 80% opacity layer and I'm gonna draw over it with a red color so we can define the hand shape. This way you'll understand what I'm going to try to explain.. We're going to create some geometrical shapes, for fingers we're going to use cylinders that are split in 3 parts, while for metacarpals we're going to define a sort of a squarish shape, lets call it like that.

You can start with a square this would be the palm of your hands then we can add five cylinders that represent the fingers and the last part would be the wrist. Now we're going to add some basic shapes and make them three-dimensional to really add that sense of space and realism and then we'll add a bunch of details like the bones, muscles and all those stuff and finally we'll add some paint rendering and that's usually how my process goes but let's go in depth for each part starting with the basic anatomy.

 

So the hands can be divided like I've said into three parts: the palm, the fingers and the wrist. I usually start with the palm, but once you have the basic lines already made, I started from the smaller finger to define my line art. When we starting with a palm you can simplify by drawing planes of geometrical shapes, they're really useful in this these kind of situations because our brain can't comprehend sometimes the actual anatomy.

Anyway going back to the drawing, we're going to make a decent sketch before painting, for me this method is pretty handy because next up we'll add some base colors you can choose whatever color you want as long as you pick colors that are neutral, mid-tones, we might want to avoid saturated colors because we're going to add blending modes later.

Next I'll add the color layer. I’m picking a mid-tone fleshy base. In CSP, I usually use the 'Refer to other layers' bucket tool to fill in quickly. Don't worry about being perfect yet; we just need a solid foundation to build on. This step is all about blocking in the big stuff like highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. It always looks a little weird at this stage but we have to trust the process! I’m using a soft airbrush to map out where the light hits the knuckles and where the deep shadows live between the fingers.

 

 

Now that I've chosen the midtones, for the shadow now let's simplify the shadow by picking a single value to represent the parts that are in shadow, that alone will give us useful information on where the shadow and light is located, and from there we're just going to work on everything in between like the midtones and other stuff. Just a short tip for painting whenever you're painting shadows I like to combine a couple of more midtones like this I don't recommend using colors that are too dark becausethe skin will look muddy. I always use either warm or cool shadows because I think they look really good on a skin.

Now that we've filled out those gaps from the bucket tool, I'm going to merge the lineart layer with the color base one so the hand can stand out a bit more with details.

 

I've started to apply nail color, and I'm slowly adding depth to the middle finger by increasing the darker shadows and highlights. I'm using the airbrush tool, and I've increased the opacity a bit more and reduced the size of the brush, making it smaller so I can define those darker tones similar to the ones I added in the previous step.

 

You might have noticed I've added some skin texture, this is where you can really play around with the details and the brushes. If you want it to look a bit 'undead' or creepy, like I've choosen in this case, i like to use a desaturated purple for these tiny details. So how to figure it out where to add those lines? Look at your own knuckles see those tiny horizontal lines? I’m drawing those in with a super thin, slightly darker brush. But here’s the trick: don’t just draw straight lines. Make them slightly curved and varied in length. It makes the joints look like they’ve actually spent years bending and stretching.

Now, let’s talk about those highlights! Since we’re painting a white hand, the highlights are key to making the skin look realistic and not just flat. When a hand is flexed like this, the skin gets really tight over the bone. So what i do is create a new layer, add a blending mode 'Glowing Dodge', it will look like almost-white color and hitting the 'peaks' of the knuckles. Think of each knuckle like a little mountain—the light hits the very top first. You might notice the redness on the hands that's due to the light shining through the blood in our hands which would sometimes transition to Orange which looks pretty neat to illustrate this. This process I'm going to use on all the fingers now..

 

For the fine hairs. I’m using a tiny, sharp brush to add those little wisps near the wrist and the sides of the hand. Keep your strokes quick and light! For a white hand, I usually go with a light brown or a desaturated blonde tone so it looks natural.

And for the final touch we're going to add this hazy lighting to achieve that we're going to add a collar Dodge layer then we're going to use an airbrush to create that dreamy effect.

 

You can always add more details and accessories if you want, like i used in this case and created teal, blueish veins, the hand will immediately look much more realistical, add we're going to add few more adjustments and we should be done and that's it I hope this tutorials will help you paint your own drawing. Share your thoughts in the comments below, and let me know what other stuff you would like to see from me. See you next time!