Introduction

Hello aspiring artists, my name is Ethan Scott. Drawing hands has always and will always be a challenge for beginners. This tutorial will give you a new found confidence in drawing them. I will be demonstrating what I call the "stable house" method of learning. The Stable House method involves creating a solid foundation on which to construct your work. All good structures need a foundation that will last through time. Atop that foundation we will build our framework, the skeleton if you will. This framework will need to be sturdy, but also well thought out. It needs to make sense and it needs to be a clean canvas onto which beautiful architecture sprouts. After this stage, the details of the structure can always change. What's most important is the foundation of the structure is strong enough for that change. If that is true, the architect (you)will have the know how to build the rest of the house, again and again, with ease.

Simple Forms

To start our foundation, we must learn the most basic forms of the hand. To do this, I will represent the hand with a series of simple shapes.

Let us start with an orthographic view of the hand. If placed flat on a surface the top of the hand will slope downward, towards the fingertips. The wrist will follow this slope, but will not be touching the surface. The palm, in all views of the hand, is the largest part. As the fingers extend they split into three parts, each shorter than the last.

Looking at a top view of the hand we can see that the wrist also slopes into the thumb, which extends past the top of the palm. The top of the palm, as well as the fingers, point upward with the middle finger as its tip. The ring finger is second longest, followed by the index and then pinkie.

Our four fingers have limited side to side motion while having a large range of forward and backward. The thumb has a wide range of motion in all directions at its base.

Structure and Anatomy

Now that you have a basic understanding of the hands shape, it's time to bolster the strength of that knowledge. To do that an artist must emulate the ancients by studying human anatomy.

Bones are complex, but once you understand their shape, position and movement, that complexity begins to fade away. Without bones we humans would be blobs of meat with nowhere to go. Luckily our body has this network of rigid sticks to hold us up, and our hand is jam packed with them.

First up, like our metaphorical house, the hand needs a foundation, a base. This base is our wrist. The wrist is where our hand rotates on the forearm bones; the Ulna and Radius (represented in light blue). The Ulna is on the outside of your arm and stays in place. The Radius though, twists around the Ulna as the wrist rotates. These two bones form the foundation of the hand.

At the base of the palm is a cluster of small bones called the Carpals (represented in dark blue). These bones will be where the Metacarpals extend (represented in dark purple). These finger-like bones are still inside our palm, they end at our knuckles on the backside. From these bones, extends the Phalanges, better known as our fingers (represented in pink, red and yellow). The Phalanges are separated into three parts, the thumb though, only has two parts. Studying the basic shape and size of each piece provides a more educated and accurate understanding of the hand and its anatomy. Once one understands this, drawing it in more dynamic poses becomes easier.

 

Think of each phalanges and metacarpal bone as a tube with a pinched center, or if that is too tough, just a tube. Build your hand out of basic shapes like above.

Muscles

The hand not only has many bones, but it also has many muscles and tendons that help it move. Knowing the names of these is not as important as the bones, as they are very complicated would not provide a better understanding in the way of art. But knowing their basic layout and function can aid the artist in learning. First I will mention one of the more obvious parts, the Extensor tendons and their Sheaths. These are those lines you see on top of your hand that flex when you move your fingers up and down. The tendon is sliding in and out of the sheath, they help extend the fingers outward. There is, conversely, a similar thing on the bottom side of the hand. These are visible at the base of the hand when one bends the hand down or extends the thumb inward. These tendons also have sheaths and move in the Carpal Tunnel, these are the Flexor Tendons, which help flex the fingers inward.

 

Major muscles that should be recognized are the Pollicis muscles on the thumb, the Minimi on the pinky side of the hand. These two muscles are often seen bulging on the sides of the hand, or in the palm when curved inward.

The Parts of the Hand

Palm

The palm, mentioned earlier as being the largest section of the hand, is a complex and difficult piece to draw. This is particularly because of its ability to flex and bend much like a baseball glove (Those gloves were designed to fit human hands after all, just much more exaggerated). The most important part of drawing the palm is making sure that the muscles of the thumb and pinky are shown to overlap at certain angles and the lines in the skin are shown from time to time. The palm also extends past the metacarpal bones slightly, you can see this on your own hand, the knuckles which are the ends of the metacarpals are slightly lower than the top of the palm.

Fingers

Drawing the fingers comes mostly down to anatomy practice as they don't have a lot of muscle on top of them that changes their shape. Exaggerating the knuckles on the hand can sometimes help in making the hand feel real, but don’t over do it. Fingers also have webbed skin in between them that should be kept in mind when fingers move independently of each other.

-Thumb

The thumb is almost just part of the palm, as its major muscle, the Pollicis, makes up a large chunk of the palm. Important parts to remember about thumbs is that they slope off of the wrist, with a slight bump. The thumb is slightly wider than the other four fingers and the last Phalanges bone in the thumb is usually drawn with a slight curve in it. Drawing the fingerprint sometimes helps accentuate the direction of the thumb, this can be helpful with other fingers as well.

 

-Wrist

The wrist is very simple, it consists of the Carpal tendons and the forearm bones, the Ulna and Radius. An interesting note to make is on the top of the hand, the tendons that lead from the thumb to the wrist form a small pocket when the hand is flat and the fingers are stretched out. The Ulna on the opposite side also produces a small bump just before the beginning of the hand. This bump is easier to see on hands with less body fat.

 

Natural forms and Action

Now that the foundation has been poured and is set, building something on top of that is necessary. Drawing the hands in action is the next step. One of the more common positions for hands is the fist, though many artists get this wrong the first time. When the hand is in a fist the fingers do not form a flat shelf, they curve downwards towards the pinky. The wrist also bends according to the aggressiveness of the fist.

When the hand has extended fingers, depending on how much motion, and emotion is put into the action, the fingers will sometimes have a slight backwards curve in them. This can be exaggerated for emphasized emotion.

When the hand is in a more relaxed and resting position the fingers tend towards curving slightly inward towards the palm, as well as inward towards each other. Remember how the fist had a slope, well, the fingers extend in that shape as well. But once they are fully extended that slope is harder to notice.

 

Conclusion

Get to know your hand, observe the way it flexes, and how the different parts behave as you move it about, use your new knowledge of its anatomy and draw lots of hands with ease. With that baseline of knowledge it should be much easier from here on out.