Thoughts on Drawing Hands Part 2

This is part 2 of a larger series about how to learn to draw hands. Here's part one if you missed it.

Before we start, here's a short service announcement. Try to practice drawing from life rather than from photo reference whenever possible. I know this is a pain. It's tempting to do a google image search for "hand gesture." But, discipline will pay off in the later on. Drawing from life forces you to think about hands as 3D objects.

It's easy to jump straight into breaking down photos into lines and silhouettes when you're drawing from a 2D reference. But this approach tends to limit your understanding of whatever you're drawing, because it doesn't push you has hard. Drawing from life will help you draw from imagination later on.

Start drawing your friends hands, or your non-dominant one. When you want to view a gesture from a different angle, try using a mirror. If you absolutely must use a 2D reference, this is a great site that gives you a variety of poses and times you to boot! *Thanks DemonJack!*
Also, always include a couple inches of wrist and forearm too.

Enough preamble, let's begin!

Though hands can be challenging subjects to draw, they're not mystical. We can approach them like we'd approach any other subject; which is to understand their three dimensional structure. Once you understand how something takes up space, you're 7/8's  of the way finished. Or maybe it's 2/3's.... Wait, no. It's 7/8's.  Anywho, lets look at few ways that we can approach the topic.

First, I'd recommend drawing flat hands like this:

Try a few palm up and palm down. The main goal  is to internalize things like how long the fingers are with respect to each other and the palm. How wide is the wrist with respect to the palm? How do the knuckles line up? etc. Notice how I said "internalize" rather than "memorize." The goal is to get an accurate sense of what feels and looks right. Consciously knowing that the average pinky is 2/3's as long as the average pointer finger won't be of much use when tackling more complicated poses. The only way to get this sense is a lot of repetition.

I'll keep this post short and stop here for now. In part 3, we'll look at how to break down more complicated side poses.

Thoughts on Drawing Hands Part 1

Getting better at drawing hands is one of the top goals for every beginning artist that I know. When it comes to expression, emotion, and character, hands are second only to the face. However, for most people, they're dense little cluster of foreshortening that turn into a little ball of sad sausages. To make matters worse, experienced clients, editors, and other artists will consciously look for the way you draw hands to quickly gauge your skill level.

For this reason, I made it my April goal to improve my skill at drawing hands by doing 100 life size sketches of hands drawn from life. I'm proud to say that I've met my goal! This post series is about the different methods I used and liked to learn/draw hands quickly.

I want to make make it clear before we begin that I am not claiming to be a master at hands. I still have many 1,000's of bad hands to draw before I'd consider myself good. These two posts are mostly about my thought process.

On a quick side note, if you want to check out a master at drawing hands look to Bouguereau. His hands are insane!!

Check out those digits!

So far, I've come across 3 anatomy books that I really like and would recommend.

Bridgeman's guide is must have. It's been in circulation since the 20's! That's how you know that it's good. The main idea of the book is to learn to break down the body into it's component parts. (All the way to the bones themselves when necessary). 

Anatomy for the Artist is jam packed with hi resolution images of both male and female nude models. Like Bridgeman's guide, it breaks the body into parts, but it also comes with a master class an assignments for each one. The language is very clear and concise as well. 

An entire book on hands. While the illustration is a bit stylized, there is a lot to learn in this book.  I'm still working through it.