Drawing the Hands

Before drawing the hands--a subject as complex as drawing the human body, or the face, it's imperative to have a solid foundation to be able to effectively draw them. I'll be giving brief lessons of basic concepts, with each lesson building upon the previous, and eventually be putting everything together in practical drawing exercises for you to do.

 

 

Ratios/Proportions

Ratios appropriately proportion the hands so hands can be recognized as hands. Taking care to realize these ratios and other visual patterns is necessary to develop an accurate comprehension of what the hand looks like.

• The longest finger of the hand, always the middle finger, is on average equal in proportion to the length of the palm. Vertically drawing a line right through the midsagittal plane of the wrist divides both the palm of the hand and the wrist into equal halves.

• The fingers are divided into 3 sections, with the proportions gradually shortening from the section closest to the palm to the section furthest from the palm, the thumb, an exception to this, is only made up of 2 sections and each section equal to the other.

• **Arcs (in green) are sweeping, sloped lines that span from one finger to the other, from one knuckle to the rest. These arcs allow you to accurately guesstimate the varying lengths of the fingers.

 

 

Major Structures of the Hand

• The fingers, which I will be mostly referring to as the phalanges, are composed of 3 parts, the part closest to the rest of the forms of the hands is the proximal phalanx (singular noun of phalanges), the furthest form from the rest of the hand, the distal phalanx, and the part in-between, the middle or intermediate phalanx. The thumb bone is absent of the middle phalanx and is only comprised of two parts, the proximal and distal phalanx.

• The metacarpals and carpals are the sections of the hand that makes up the entirety of the palm of the hand and can be simplified as one unit when describing that general form with means outside of anatomy.

• The wrist consists of the radius and ulna bone which combine with the carpals when transitioning from wrist to hand.

 

 

Superficial/Misc. Structures of the Hand

It's not enough to know just the major structures of the hand; to complete our understanding of the hand we must also understand the superficial makeup of the hand. This includes: bony protrusions, the fibrous tendons, the fleshy mounds, and the nails.

You can palpate and feel for these structures on your own hand; by engaging both your visual sense and your kinesthetic sense--the physical sensation of feeling--you enhance how well you commit these structures to memory.

• The bony protrusions on the hand (colored in green) are the knuckles and other bony processes like the styloid process of the ulna.

• The sinewy structures on the hand (colored in blue) which are especially apparent when the hand is in extension (will be described in the next section).

• The fleshy mounds (colored in red), made up of fat and muscle tissue found mostly all around the palm, anterior (palm side up) of the fingers, and distal phalanx of the thumb. The posterior or backside of the palm features one distinct mound between the thumb and index finger and one less obvious mound on the most medial part of the hand.

• The nails (colored in yellow-green) are as you'd expect are found at the most distal site of the phalanges. They sit slightly below the other forms appearing embedded rather than like a piece of paper lain atop the tips of the finger.

Some structures of the hands, skin, bones, and flesh, have special properties that are important to consider when drawing.

• The skin, the most superficial form, preceding both bone and flesh, is a structure comparable to clothing, and like with clothing comes folding, wrinkling, and stretching, and depending on the movement of the hand will express itself in said various ways.

• The fleshy portions of the hand are soft to the touch and have some give when pressed, this becomes important when wanting to draw hands interacting with other forms in a scene. When a fleshy bit of the hand comes into contact with a surface, and contacts with force, the form will give, and will contour some to the surface it's touching, if the surface touching is equal in solid quality they'll both contour one another e.g. finger to finger.

• Contrastingly, forms like the knuckles and other bony prominences are much less flexible than flesh, and will not give like flesh does. Knowing that, I describe bony features of the hand with straight, rigid lines, and fleshy features of the hand with flowing, organic lines; opposing the two lines and allowing them to come together produces an eloquent shape. Addendum to this, putting a complex, and fragmented series of lines against one, single sweeping line results in an equally compelling design.

 

 

Movements of the Hand

Understanding the movements of the hand is important to know so when crafting a hand you know you've not pushed it beyond its anatomical limits that it appears literally, physically broken. Being aware of the movements also allows you to accurately gauge the absolute limits of exaggeration; not before the anatomy can break but before the visual appeal from exaggeration breaks.

Movement only occurs at flexible joints like at the three knuckles of each finger, two knuckles of the thumb, and at the wrist.

• Abduction: Abduction is the movement present when spreading or increasing the space(s) between your fingers.

• Adduction: Adduction, the opposing movement to abduction is the movement present when closing or reducing the space(s) between your fingers.

The two aforementioned movements also occur at the wrist, with limited movement in abducting (tilting wrist thumb side) and a greater range of motion adducting (tilting wrist pinky side).

 

• Extension: Extension, the primary movement found when pointing at something or someone, present in every finger and as well at the wrist--extension at the wrist looks like when you point your knuckles to the sky without moving your arm at the elbow.

• Flexion: Flexion, is the primary movement found the most in a closed or grasped fist. Flexion at the wrist looks like the ones in the example images of “flexion” and “extension”.

How these movements translate to the thumb: Because of the unique orientation of the thumb relative to the rest of the digits the movements may look different but function just the same; bringing the thumb away from the forms of the hand is abduction and bringing the thumb towards the forms of the hand is adduction and flexion and extension is the curling and straightening at the knuckles of the thumb, as is with the rest of the knuckles, of the other digits.

 

Compelling Posing and Stylization

When composing a pose it's important to consider two reliable principles: Foreshortening & Breaking Uniformity

• Foreshortening is a dramatasizing effect wherein objects or forms closer to the camera appear, usually, exponentially larger than the rest of the forms in an image--how extreme the effects depend entirely on camera focal length, the wider the focal length the more extreme and in a similar sense the more narrow the less extreme. What foreshortening means for picturemaking and in my example involving hands is the generation of a foreground, midground, and background, see in the example how the tone gradually lightens as forms recede into the background, this concept results in depth and as well as a result of depth a visual composition with explicit visual direction engaging and guiding the eyes of a viewer.

• Breaking uniformity in context of posing a hand means to skew the positioning of the various forms of the hand whether its at the wrist, fingers, thumb. Another approach of thinking is warping an imagined straight line to favor asymmetry, if not and if not compositionally intentional, linearity can appear tense, boring, and plain.

Stylization: Building on what we know about proportions and structural qualities, depending on how we choose to adjust and make decisions outside of what is the average will define the style.

Observations made in common stylizations: Feminine, Masculine, Youthful, and Aged Hands

• Tendons and knuckles are less discrete in the youth and feminine hands, and more apparent in the hands of men and the elderly.

• The skin of aged hands becomes especially slack, appearing in the form of many wrinkles and scrunching of the skin like at the knuckles.

• A consistent theme across masculine hands are of rectangular, and overall more squared shapes and boxed construction, and with feminine and young hands round and more oblong in shape theme.

• Youthful and feminine hands are characteristic of it's use of roundness and ease of flow from one line to the next whereas masculine and aged hands are defined by their angular and abrupt changes from one line to the next.

 

 

References

Before drawing get and use references!

References are a must when drawing to improve and when wanting to get to a level beyond the use of reference aka drawing from imagination or memory. What kind of references you use is up to your needs. I use primarily 3 different types of references, each for their own unique use.

• I like to use photos or a live model of my own hand when I'm having trouble figuring out a nuance of the form like veins, which I would not be able to perceive with lower fidelity references.

• I use 3d models when I need a particular lighting scenario, a flexibility that I otherwise usually cannot get from my own photos or life.

**Conveniently, CSP has a built in 3D model function specifically for hands, found in the "manage materials" tab and in the "Pose" folder. Drag the asset to your canvas and you can play with the various functions.

• And when I want to elevate my capacity for style, say for a more compelling arrangement of tone or flow of line I look to other, usually better or different artists and I try to emulate or incorporate parts of their work into my own.

 

 

Drawing

Now that we've developed a basic understanding of the hand we can now put it to practice by drawing hands through exercise. The primary exercises ill be outlining are gesture and construction.

 

 

Gesture (Exercise)

Using what we've learned from the movements of the hand and the structures of the hand we can now apply it in gesture.

When doing gesture drawings the primary goal is capturing the ethos or put more simply the core essence of the subject. This is achieved in the form of managing the line count and how one line flows to the next. Utilizing what you now know of the basic movements of the hand and the structures of a hand be brief and make complete and efficient use of each and every single stroke. With each line you put down you communicate a piece of the drawing: the solidity of a knuckle, the soft and fleshy mounds of a hand, or maybe even the delicate curling of a pinky finger.

Less abstractly, another concept to consider when gesture drawing is making use of something called anchoring, placing lines that anchor and ground your conception of the imaginary space, so that every line succeeding is accurate, at least relative to the anchoring lines; essentially they're reference points in space that aid in making marks. This is especially useful to apply in the next exercise "Construction".

 

Construction (Exercise)

Exercising construction is an important step when eventually wanting to draw hands from imagination. Breaking down a subject into solid parts will ease the process of producing believable, tangible images.

When constructing the hand you may begin with simple volumes gradually filling the gaps as you continue to challenge yourself with different, more complex and challenging volumes.

I like to use rectangular prisms as they best represent many things at their most rudimentary form. Considering basic proportions and the major volumes that make up the hand we can produce the desired length and width of the volumes. The volumes are all more or less the same shape, but the most distal digit of the hands (see far right of the basic phalanx forms example) is subtly distinct from the rest of the parts of the digits, tapering at the end, more like the actual tips of fingers.