Now we need to deal with the other finger joints I don’t mind telling you guys, drawing it is much easier than explaining it! I hope this is making sense! The next bit is a little trickier, but stay with me. Forget the thumb just for a second, if you divide that rectangle in half the other way that gives you the middle point between the fingers, then divide again to give you each individual finger, like this

So we’ve got the most important horizontal landmarks down but what about the vertical? Well as I said before it’s strangely mathematical! The human body likes symmetry, as I mentioned on the first picture, the width is roughly half of whatever you made the length, which means if you draw two squares to make a rectangle you can’t go far wrong. Draw two lines to determine the size you want the hand to be top and bottom, divide that space into two and then divide one of the new spaces into two so you get: Just looking at the middle finger for now, notice how half way along (a quarter of the hand length if you like) is a knuckle, this gives you your landmarks to construct a flat hand. Roughly the hand is half the width of the length. The fingers account for the other 4 inches (please don’t draw fingers all the same length!) Don’t get too caught up in the actual length of each finger, I’ll show you a great way to guesstimate this in a bit. It does make me wonder when you look at the human as a machine, the anatomy is strangely mathematical, as if WE were designed on a drawing board, hmm, that’s my scifi alien conspiracy head talking…īack on Earth, you’ll notice my hand is roughly 8 inches from the base/wrist to the tip of my middle finger and that the back of my hand is around half of that at 4 inches. OK, so here’s my left hand, to keep things simple I’ve rounded the measurements to the nearest inch, but to be honest they are not far off anyway. You will find as you go that despite there being seemingly thousands of different positions and angles to draw hands in once you understand a few you’ll be able to bridge the gaps and create any number of positions.īut remember to use reference to help you, there isn’t a test at the end! As long as you can create great drawings is all that matters, how you get there doesn’t matter so much, it’s the end result that’s important.įirst off, to my followers sorry I didn’t post last weekend! I really want to put out a new post a week but I was really busy at work and then got so into my own graphic novel my schedule went out of the window!Īnyway, after the previous posts on faces and heads I figured we’d take a break from that topic and this time and have a look at hands, which after faces are probably the next trickiest thing to learn but it’s no problem really I’m gonna break it down, take it slow and you’ll get it in no time! I’ll be doing another post on faces and heads soon, probably expressions.Īs always before we get to do the technical stuff we need a foundation to understand the construction so here’s the basics, learn this properly and the tough stuff gets loads easier! It’s not very often you’ll need to draw hands in such detail, but it will help you familiarise yourself with how hands work. Try to learn maybe 3 basic hand positions off by heart, a fist, a grip position and an open hand for example, then you can expand your skills to include more positions.

It will probably take longer than you think to fully absorb the shape and structure of the hand so the quickest way to learn it is to draw every day! In fact if you drew the best hand you could right now and then practiced every day for 15 minutes in two weeks you’d be amazed how much of an improvement you’dve made! When you start out I would advise you to ALWAYS use reference, get on Google images and search for hands doing certain activities, take photos of your own hands or those of a friend to get a different angle. Hands are one of those topics that are easy when you know how! I had a hard time getting to ‘know how’! Don’t get frustrated if you’re struggling to draw hands and fingers, this subject is one of the toughest. I used exactly the method we looked at in the previous post aswell as using my own left hand as reference! Here’s a panel from my graphic novel ‘Dark Century’, a simple open hand. Now we’re going to put those hands to use! In part one of this tutorial we figured out the basic dimensions of the hands in simplified form.

Middle finger reference drawing