Introduction

Hi I'm Linco,

 

Today I will be sharing with you how to draw hands and hopefully get you to start practicing!

 

This article will be a quick summary of my video, which you can find below, the video goes much more in-depth so I will only scratch the surface here.

 

Included in the video is real-time uncut footage of a 20-minute practice session where you can practice hand gesture drawing along with me. Please check it out!

 

 

In this article I will:

 

** Explain Drawing the Hand

 

1. Summarize the structure of the hand and finger into basic fundamental shapes.

2. Go over essential anatomy of the hand for artists

3. Give tips to use this knowledge to stylize your own hands

4. Give tips on how hands can express various character emotions

 

** Explain how I practice with Clip Studio Paint

 

1. Accessing and changing shortcuts

2. Go over useful shortcut settings for gesture practice

 

** Showcase a Painting Demo of the Hand

 

1. Quick tips for colouring the hand (warm vs. cool areas)

2. Give advice on layers

Drawing the Hand: Structure & Proportion

It is always useful to simplify complex objects to their most basic form, this is our foundational knowledge.

 

At the most basic level, the hand can be simplified as a rounded 3:4 box that is taller than it is wide. Not a hard box, a rounded box, or your hand may look robotic.

 

We can see from the three-quarters view that one end of this box should be longer. The palm side of the hand is the longer end. (Take a look at your own hands, notice how the palm side extends further, the "webbing" between your fingers is on the palm side)

 

A useful tip for placing the fingers is to divide this box in half, then your index and middle finger will go on one side, and your ring and pinky finger will go on the other side.

 

From the front view, we can see that the thumb attaches at a 45 degree angle from the rest of the hand. Now, let's talk about the fingers...

The fingers at the most basic level can be simplified into a simply cylinder. However, again this looks a bit robotic. So we will do 1 modification: make a rounded cut at the end of our fingertip.

 

1. The finger now should look like a cylinder, but with an end that looks like the front of a boat (in red). Still very easy right?

 

2. The proportion of the finger segments is often talked mentioned in many resources. Starting with the segment closest to the knuckle, each successive section is 2/3rds the length of the previous. (i.e. the middle section is 2/3rd the knuckle section, the fingertip section is 2/3rds the middle section, the finger nail is 2/3rds the fingertip section).

 

---However it's good to know this, I will show you perhaps a more intuitive way to get your fingers right in an upcoming section---

 

3. The last modification we can make to get a realistic finger is to notice that our palm side of the hand has the fat pads, so that we can soften our impact. So, it's good to draw the fingers with curves on the palm side, and with straight lines on the back side. This is the most obvious when we curl up our fingers (A - straights, B - curves).

 

A. One last proportion that can be useful, is that the length of the middle finger is about equal to the length of our palm.

 

B. Now, the thumb we should know is a fatter than our fingers. Note that it also attaches at the box-like wrist.

Drawing the Hand: Using Gestural Lines & Proportion

We can use what we just learned about proportion when coming up with hands from our imagination.

 

Because the middle finger length is roughly equal to the palm length, when we draw a hand coming towards us (top left) then we know that lengths further away get foreshortened, so here we know that we should draw our middle finger length LONGER than our hand length. Likewise if a hand is going away from us (bottom left) we know that... That's right, we should draw the hand longer than our middle finger length.

**Gestural Line Tip #1

 

For me, the '2/3rds' proportion for the finger segments is not very intuitive most situations (for example the hand on the right), so here is a technique I use and you can try:

 

Think instead of placing your fingertips and knuckles in nice gestural lines. You can see this above in purple. Notice the purple line goes through the fingertips or curves around the knuckles in a smooth flowing way.

 

If you do this, the finger placements should look natural, give it a shot!

 

**Gestural Line Tip #2

 

Another useful gestural line you can draw is a line from the wrist to the index finger. Ignoring the thumb makes it easy to see the rounded box shape of the hand. Pretend the thumb is not there, then, see if this gesture line flows smoothly. You can always add on the thumb afterwards!

Drawing Hands: Essential Anatomy

The main of the hand muscles artists need to know are indicated above.

 

There are two muscles on the palm side of the hand (on the left), we have

A. The thenar eminence (on the thumb side)

B. The hypothenar eminence (on the pinky side)

 

We can simplify these both as teardrop shapes, with the thenar eminence the bigger of the two.

 

On the backside of the hand there is:

C. The dorsal interosseous (between the thumb and index finger)

 

We can simplify this as an egg shape, try pressing your thumb up against your index finger and you can really see this. However, notice that there is another muscle I drew here with the "?" can you guess what this is? Yup, that is the hypothenar eminence from our palm view, we can see it from the back too as it wraps around.

 

Don't worry about the names if you can't remember them, it is just important to know these big masses on our hand and how to draw them!

Next up the knuckles and tendons!

 

The knuckles (A) in red can be simplified as egg shapes or ovals, while the tendons (B) in purple on the back of the hand can be simplified as stringy lines.

 

The important thing to notice is that knuckles appear more often when the hand is clenched (bottom left), especially on the index and middle finger. Meanwhile tendons appear more when the hand is stretched (bottom right).

Drawing the Hand: Stylizing your Own Way

You don't have to draw realistic hands if you don't want to, but knowing the foundational structure that we just covered will help you draw hands in any way you want!

 

These hands from imagination were done just by using what we did but emphasizing different shapes. Here are a few examples.

 

A. We can treat the hand very simply, using smooth curves. We can treat the fingers as the ship shape we talked about earlier, and place less emphasis on features like the knuckles. These can tend to look feminine.

 

B. We can instead, treat our hands with very rough straight lines. Treat the hand more like a box, even those teardrop muscle shapes we can make boxy. Emphasizing the knuckles as boxes instead of ovals. This hand looks more rough and masculine.

 

C. We can play up the roundness of our muscles or knuckles. Cartoon characters often have overly round hands. This is a bit of a combination of A and B.

 

The possibilities are limitless! However, knowledge of our foundations helps out a lot when coming up with new styles.

Drawing the Hand: Emotion Tip

The hand is an excellent way to communicate body language! It is extremely expressive, how can we get across what our characters are feeling through the hands?

 

One quick tip here is to note that that our bodies (and therefore our hands) open up when we are feeling more open. Emotions like confident, surprise, excitement.

 

Vice versa, our hands tend to close up, curl up when we are feeling closed up. Emotions like anxious, nervous, fear, confusion.

 

Compare the hands in the image above and the image below for a quick example!

How To Practice and Study: Timed Practice

There is no way to get better at drawing hands then to draw a lot of them! I know some artists are afraid of drawing hands, here are some tips to get you to stop being afraid and start drawing.

 

I will start off by saying that if you are starting out: you WILL draw bad hands. Everyone does! I still do, and so you have to accept that and practice to get better.

 

What's a good way to overcome the fear of drawing hands while practicing a lot then? Well, one great idea is timed reference practice.

 

**Benefits of Timed Practice

 

1. You will end up drawing a lot of hands if you have a time limit for each hand. If you draw 2min poses, 10 hands a day that will take up 20minutes of your day, and after a week you would have 70 hands!

2. You will worry less about drawing bad hands, you will move on to the next hand in a few minutes.

3. It is very easy to schedule into your day.

4. It forces you to focus for the entire time.

 

**Downsides

1. If you're drawing so many hands, you're going to need a lot of paper... BUT if you use Clip Studio Paint, then this downside goes away!

Here's an example of one of my 30min practice session, with 2 minutes for each hand that I did in Clip Studio. I like to keep everything on one big canvas (around 3000px by 3000px). If you're still scared of practicing, check out the video, where you can draw along with me, real-time with references of my own hand.

How to Practice and Study: Tips for Using Clip Studio Paint

If you want to do timed practice studies of anything, let me give you some tips that made it much easier for me to efficiently practice.

 

 

**Tip #1 Have Your Own Group for Gesture Practice

I first like to have my own section of brushes for timed gestural practice. Below is a gif to show you how you can easily create a new subtool group in Clip Studio Paint.

 

Simply grab any tool and drag it into the menu bar, then you automatically created a new group. You can rename the group anything you want.

These two hands were drawn in a different 5 minute per pose practice session. Notice I used the brushes in my Gesture set to practice. Here is a link where you can download the pencil tool and the textured hatching tool I use for gesture practice.

**Tip #2 Utilize the Ability to Customize Shortcuts in Clip Studio Paint

Did you know you can have shortcuts to switch between brushes quickly? There are also shortcuts to increase and decrease brush sizes. Using these shortcuts, we can save a lot of time, which is useful when doing quick gesture poses of hands.

As an example, let's add in a shortcut so that we can switch between brushes quickly.

 

1. Go to File -> Shortcut Settings

2. In the Setting Area: Go to Options

3. Scroll down and click on 'Switch to next sub tool'

4. Click 'Edit' Shortcut' and enter in a key for your shortcut.

 

Click 'OK'

 

 

Below is a GIF showing the process.

Besides switching between brushes quickly, here are some of my shortcut settings that I find helpful. Not only are efficient shortcut settings helpful for timed pose practice, they're also helpful for overall workflow efficiency!

 

Feel free to use or modify any of my shortcuts.

 

Switch to previous sub tool : S

Switch to next sub tool : D

Switch to previous sub tool group : Shift+S

Switch to next sub tool group : Shift + D

Select smaller preset than current (brush size) : Q

Select larger preset than current: W

Zoom in : 1

Zoom out : 2

Change Canvas Size : 4

 

 

 

Painting the Hand: Warm vs Cool Areas

To paint the hand, it's important to note some common patterns.

 

Warm areas: The fingertips, knuckle area, and palm are generally redder areas

 

Cool areas: The back of the hand is usually a bit cooler, this is because the veins are visible on the back of the hand.

 

For darker skin tone hands, the palm side is usually a lighter colour as you can see on the example on the right.

Painting the Hand: Layer Suggestions and Process

For a full commentary on how I painted these hands, check out the video!

 

Step 1:

I started with the lineart, practicing poses in Clip Studio Paint paid off, and I am more comfortable drawing hands from imagination, using my own hands as a quick double-check but I still have work to do!

 

Use the knowledge learned from the Drawing the Hand section of this article, notice I still use those gestural lines to help me place the knuckles in a nice spot like on the hand on the right.

Step 2:

On a new layer, add the local colour of the hands. Don't worry I will show you a list of my layers at the very end. Here I tried to use different skin tones to experiment. This is just one single colour.

 

The brushes I used for the entire painting were simply the default 'Dense watercolour brush' the 'Transparent watercolour brush' and the 'Soft Airbrush' in Clip Studio Paint!

Step 3:

Here, I used our knowledge of warm and cool areas. With a new layer clipped to our local colour layer in Step 2, I used a soft airbrush to put some generally warmer areas and cooler areas.

Step 4:

This is a BIG step, add in one more layer clipped to our local colour layer, I added in the general tone for the hands. Again, this is where our time spent practicing poses comes in handy. After drawing many hands, I have a better understanding of the shape of each individual part. Notice how I shaded the thumb in the middle hand like a sphere. I broke the shapes down to their basic shapes as we learned at the beginning.

 

One more thing to note, the knuckle area and tendons can be lighter than the other areas of the hand, you can see this on the left hand.

Step 5:

On a new layer on top of all layers, add in some finishing touches: this means fixing up mistakes and making your final decisions. This also includes cleaning up some of our line art, I erased a few of the gestural lines on my initial line art.

 

A nice effect I like to do in Clip Studio Paint is to duplicate the line art layer and go to 'Filter -> 'Blur' -> 'Gaussian Blur' and then change the opacity. You can see this in the video.

What this does is it helps blend the lines into the hand, which can make the whole thing look more cohesive.

Here is the finished layer setup matching the steps above. Here are a few things you should notice!

 

(3) and (4) are clipped to the local colour layer on the bottom, this makes it easier so that we do not paint outside of what we have coloured in on the local colour layer.

 

The red layers are lineart, notice that they have lowered opacity, this is so that they blend in more with the painting.

 

As a final note, you definitely do not have to follow these steps exactly! It is just how I painted the hands this time, if you like to work on one layer, go ahead and do it! Or if you want to use more layers than I did, that is fine too. Do what is comfortable for you and experiment with new methods, there is a lot to explore in Clip Studio Paint.

Thank you for reading this article and checking out the video, I hope you learned something new. I hope you'll be practicing more hands, because I will be!

 

Linco