Hi Guys!
First 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!
Anyway, 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.
As 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.
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. 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…
Back 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. 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. Roughly the hand is half the width of the length.
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. 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:
Hand size total
Palm/Back of hand size and fingers
Knuckle placement for middle finger
Make sense? 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. 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
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.
Now we need to deal with the other finger joints
My half of a half rule starts to fall apart if we try to half it again to find the knuckles behind the finger tips, damn! But it almost works for the middle finger again and we are only drawing, lives are not at stake here! If you look at the photo above you’ll notice the tip of my middle finger is at the 4 inch mark and the first knuckle back is at the 3 inch mark and the main knuckle (er, it probably has an official latin name but I don’t know it) is sort of at the 2 inch mark. So you can see it kinda works for the middle finger but the other fingers are more difficult to deal with, so what do we do?
Now we can look at the other fingers and learn their relationship and position to each other
If you look at the back of your own hand you’ll see the middle finger is the longest and the fingers directly either side are slightly shorter, the index finger being slightly shorter than its far neighbour (you can easily get away with drawing the two fingers either side of the middle finger the same length if that’s easier to remember, I won’t tell anyone!). The little finger is by far the shortest, remember every hand is the same but different so you can get away with slight inaccuracies without it looking awkward.
In the photo above the hand is in a very simplistic form so the fingers are not usually that fat (or square!) but it illustrates the point.
Placement of the other knuckles is really easy once you learn this shape, we’ve looked at basic hand construction now so you should be able to put this shape across to figure out the rest. The knuckles roughly copy the finger tips but kind of flatten out the further down the fingers you go, until you meet the ball joints at the base of the fingers which are almost completely in line.
Try to remember the ‘arrow’ shape it makes and also remember that this is for the BACK of the LEFT hand, if you turn the hand around or draw the right hand you need to make the adjustment!
Now for the thumb!
Ahh back to easy division! half the palm/back of hand area, this gives you the landmark for where the thumb is located on the main body of the hand. Notice how the thumb doesn’t just stick out of the hand like a tree branch sticks out of a trunk, it’s built up, it has a support. Look at your own hand, there is a slight triangular shape above the thumb, I don’t think there is a specific way of working this out, I just guess. The thumb is slightly thicker than the fingers, so be sure to account for that, and then anchor the thumb to the base of the palm area.
If you get the fingers proportioned right, it’s pretty easy to get the thumb the right size and in the right place, if you don’t it’ll stick out like a sore… thumb (I could not resist that, I’ve been battling hand puns this whole tutorial! get a grip!)
I’ve left in my guide lines so you can see how I created the shape of the thumb, but really it’s just a matter of looking at your own hands and working it out, but the hard part is essentially done in the basic construction.
putting it all together:
As I said it’s not very often you’ll need to draw hands quite like this, unless your character is directing traffic or slaps a lot of people! but it will give you a good primer on how to construct the hands. Feel free to vary the process here, you may want your characters to have longer or shorter, thinner or fatter hands etc but the process should serve you well whatever you want to do.
In Part 2 of this tutorial we’ll be looking at more useful and dynamic poses for hands where we can get them doing stuff like punching, hold and using things like these below. Plus we’ll be looking at the mechanics of the hands as I’ve hinted in the pic above, with the finger in the top right.
Don’t get frustrated, have fun with it, hands are not an easy thing to learn!
How To Draw Graphic Novel Art 