1- INTRODUCTION

Hi everyone, it´s Konart.

This time, I will show you some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years that have helped me draw better hands.

Some of the tips here, I really don’t use them anymore, but they where a lot of help when I was starting out. That’s something you might notice too, the more you practice this things, the more steps you’ll be able to skip, so don’t feel like you have to apply every single one of this tips when you draw any hand, they are just a guide that will hopefully help you understand some concepts better.

 

2- BRUSHES

For this tutorial we’ll be using just 2 brushes: one for sketching and one for painting.

I think it’s important to tell you that although you might want to use a special brush for skin or a specific texture to make it look more realistic, you don’t need to do that, in fact, I would advise against that. Focusing on little textures and details is not the main point, it doesn’t matter how realistic a texture is, if the structure is wrong, it will still look wrong, so if you’re having trouble drawing hands, start by forgetting about the little details and focus on the general structure.

 

For sketching you just need a brush that looks similar to a pencil, with a bit of texture and opacity.

For painting, you need a brush with a bit more texture than the one used for sketching.

 

3- STRUCTURE

The first thing you need to remember, is the structure and proportions of the hand.

The basic form of the hand is a pentagon, and you can simplify the fingers as cylinders. As we see each part of the hand, you’ll see how to break these shapes into more complex ones, but at the beginning, this is all you need to remember

 

The main proportion guide that you must remember is that the palm has the same length as the middle finger. However, this is considering the distance to the knuckles, that is important because the skin between the fingers will make the palm look bigger and the fingers shorter.

 

As for the length of the fingers, you can divide it in half to locate the first joint, and then again to find the second one. The overall length of each finger will vary depending on which finger it is. You can get an approximate of the size of the fingers by drawing a curve

 

4- GESTURE

The gesture is the first thing you should draw of the hand, it is what gives it motion and life. The way I think about it, you should learn the structure first and then the gesture, because even if I’m telling you that the gesture is the first thing that you should draw, having knowledge about the structure will help you keep in mind the limits of the hand and the proportions that you’ll have to apply later on.

To draw the gesture of the hand means to draw the flow or motion it creates, there isn’t a specific rule for how to do this, but a good guide is to follow the direction the fingers make or the general shape of the hand. For example, if you want to draw a fist, the gesture will look more circular, but it would look completely different if the hand was extended. A good general rule is that with just the gesture you should be able to tell what the hand is doing.

Gesture is extremely important, specially if you’re drawing more stylized hands, like in cartoons or anime. Try and look at some cartoons for kids and you’ll see that most of the time, the hands are drawn in an exaggerated way to empathize the gesture, since it makes the drawing way easier to understand

Knowing the structure and gesture of the hand will help you draw most of the hands you’ll need, I’d suggest you to practice these principles a lot before moving on to other details since that will help you improve faster. Once you can draw the basic structure and gesture of the hand, you’ll be able to understand better some tips that help you draw some of the details of the hand.

5- SIMPLIFY

By focusing on the basic structure and gesture of the hands, you’ll be drawing a simplified version of the hand, however, that might still be a bit difficult, at least it was for me. I remember having a lot of trouble drawing the fingers, since there’s just a lot of parts to consider, it overwhelmed me. But you don’t need to focus on each individual finger, you can simplify the hand even more to help you understand the position of each finger and how they change the gesture

 

Try to always group fingers together, you can group 2, 3 or 4 fingers into the same shape, the point is to reduce the amount of shapes you need to think about. This can also help you to indicate the tension of the hand. Relaxed poses will tend to group more fingers together, while very tense or dynamic poses will tend to separate each finger, an exception to this rule would be a fist.

 

When the fingers can’t be grouped together, you can still simplify the shape by imagining there’s a net between them. Linking all the fingers will also create a shape that will help you with the gesture of the pose

6- GENERAL TIPS

This section contains mainly tips for specific details about the hands, like the way the skin looks in specific poses or how the fingers bend. Even tough you probably won't need to apply every single one of these tips in the same drawing, it's good to keep them in mind just to have an idea of how the hand works

Use the wrist. Even if you’re focused on drawing just the hand, try and draw the wrist too. The wrist adds a lot of gesture and motion to the hand, so use that to your advantage to draw better poses

Think of the wrist as another part between the hand and the arm. When the hand is completely extended, the wrist will look more like a square pointing a bit down, and this can also help give the hand more gesture

The main things to keep in mind when drawing the wrist are the bones from the forearm, the tendons that can be seen when you bend the hand, and the wrinkles below the palm.

The palm is thicker at the base. When you’re drawing the hand flat on a surface, don’t draw it flat, it has a slight inclination, and that helps it look less boring in poses like that

The palm isn’t flat. This is a common mistake, many people draw the palm as a flat shape, but it has a curve. When you’re seeing the hand flat on a surface, you can ignore it, but in poses where the fingers are pointing to the camera or when drawing fists, it’s very noticeable

There is a lot of skin between the fingers, so this creates an angle in the palm that makes the fingers look longer when looking at the back of the hand that when looking at the palm. This makes the skin reach roughly the middle of the first joint in the fingers.

The wrinkles at the bottom of the fingers don’t match the wrinkles in the knuckles, the difference is small, but you should keep it in mind, since it changes the proportions

When the fingers are bent like in a fist, there’s little to no space between the wrinkles, so don’t be scared to draw all the wrinkles connected.

When extended, the fingers aren’t perfectly straight, they bend slightly upwards at the end, specially the thumb, the thumb has a visible curve even in relaxed poses.

The fingers tend to point towards the center of the hand, or towards the middle finger when they are grouped together or when the hand is partially closed.

he knuckle of the middle finger pops out a lot more than the others, specially when making a fist, but this is also noticeable in many other poses, so it works as a landmark for the hand

The thumb doesn’t bend as much. The first joint of the thumb doesn’t bend as much as the other fingers, of course, this varies from person to person, but it works as a general rule and it helps if you simplify the thumb into just 2 parts and add the missing joint later.

Because of the shape of the fingers, when they’re foreshortened, the top part becomes a lot bigger than what you might think, this is mainly because of the curve the fingers have at the tip.

The nails aren’t flat, they curve around the fingers, and you can use that to give it a lot more perspective. The shape of the nails at the bottom is rounded, but sometimes, in order to convey the perspective better, it’s a good idea to make it straighter.

Usually, the base of the fingers can bend a bit backwards when the hand is stretched out, the first joint can bend a bit more than 90 degrees and the second joint can bend a bit less than 90 degrees, this is important to make sure that the range of motion is realistic. Also, the second joint can’t bend a lot unless the first joint is also bent.

Draw the muscles of the hand. The muscles of the hand can be simplified into 3 shapes: 2 at the thumb and one on the pinky side. These muscles pop up more when you move your thumb or when you close your hand, so they will change the shape of the hand slightly.

But more importantly, these muscles create wrinkles in the skin, and you can use those wrinkles to give the hand more gesture and make it look even more dynamic.

Even when you’re grouping fingers together, try not to draw every finger in the exact same position, since that will make the pose boring. Adding slight variations to the fingers will make your drawing look more natural.

7- DIFERENT STYLES AND DIFERENT HANDS

There are many ways to draw hands, it depends on the style you’re using and the character those hands belong to, so here are some thing to consider.

 

It’s a good idea to do this regardless of the style you’re using, but specially if you’re trying to draw more realistic hands, try to use the contrast between the hard parts and the soft parts of the hand. Usually the back of the hand has straight lines because of the bones, while the palm side has more curves because of the muscles.

 

If you’re drawing more stylized hands, try to use the same shape language throughout the whole hand, for example, drawing it with hard square shapes will give it a very different feeling than if you draw it using more delicate lines and curves

As a general rule, to draw men’s hands, use squares, for women, use slight curves and long pointy fingers, and for babies use circles and make the fingers shorter

The more details you add to the hand, like wrinkles, tendons, veins and other things, the older the hand will look, while less details will make it look smoother and younger.

8- TIPS FOR PRACTICE

I know that’s a lot of things to remember, but don’t worry, over time you’ll be drawing nice looking hands without having to think too much about it. To improve the way you draw hands, you will need to practice, and practice a lot, so it won’t be fast, however, trough time I’ve found some ways of practicing that I found more efficient than others. This is what worked for me, so it might not work for everyone, but I think you should give it a try since it might speed up your improvement at least a little bit.

 

Focus on what you need and nothing else. If you want to draw hands well, spend your time practicing how to draw the structure and proportions of the hand. You don’t need to add details like wrinkles and nails to the hand, it’s just practice, the more details you add to each hand, the longer it will take you to draw each hand and the slower you’ll improve. If you want to draw better fingers, practice just the fingers, if you’re having trouble with the wrist, practice just the wrist, the more things you draw at the same time, the more things you’ll have to consider and that will make you lose focus, so just focus on one thing at the time.

 

Practice from photos. You might think that you can draw the hands perfectly from memory, or that you just need to copy other artists, but that has some problems. Drawing from imagination should come after learning to draw from photos or from life, since there’s a lot of things you might not notice at first glance. Also, if you’re practicing from other drawings, you’re looking at a simplified version of the hand, that’s the way that artist has of simplifying the hand, so there might be some details missing.

Set a time limit. Take a lot of reference photos and then try to draw each one in a given time, like 5 minutes or 15 seconds. Each time try to do it faster, until you’re comfortable with 1 minute or less. This is because when you have a time limit, you won’t get distracted by unnecessary details, so you’ll find some ways to simplify the hand in order to draw it faster. This will also speed up the pace at which you practice, so you’ll improve faster

9- PAINTING HANDS

This tutorial is mainly for drawing hands, not painting them, but I thought that it would be good to show you the way I paint hands in case you want to start adding color to your drawings

 

I start by making the sketch, it doesn’t need to have a lot of details, since it will just be a guide

 

I lower the opacity of the sketch and in a layer below I add the main color.

Then I make a clipping mask for the color layer and use a single color to separate the shadows

Now I can delete the sketch and start refining the shape of the hand

Then I start blending the shadows with softer transitions and add the details of thinks like the wrinkles. I also pay attention to make the palm a lighter tone in this step.

Once I’m happy with the base, I add the details of the nails with a lighter and more saturated tone, then I use a slightly darker and redder tone for the knuckles and the fingertips and a bit of green to indicate the veins. At this point, you can start adding as much detail as you want.

And it’s done.

10- THANK YOU

At the end of the day, I think the best advice I can give you to draw hands is to practice a lot daily and not to focus on unnecessary details. This takes time, so it might be a bit frustrating if you don’t see a big improvement fast, but don’t give up, when you’re afraid to draw something because you’re bad at it, the best way to fix that problem is to face it and draw that thing a lot. I still struggle to draw hands sometimes, but since I practice drawing them a lot, I don’t have fear to draw them, and I just see them as another part of the drawing, so keep it up and with time you’ll see that you’ll be able to draw them without having to think about it.

 

Thank you for reading to the very end, I really hope this tutorial was of some help to you, if it did, feel free to give it a like and leave a comment. Also, you can check out my stuff on @ricardokonart (IG) and @RicardoKonart (twitter). See you later