Exercise 0E: How to Draw Hands 1

This lesson will teach you how to draw the hand. In Part 1, you will see the hand’s parts and proportions in 2d. In Part 2, you will learn how to use basic cubes and cylinders as those parts. Then you can draw the hand in any pose!

Here’s the sequence from start to finish. We’ll take it step by step after this.

Let’s start at the beginning! With a couple of dots and lines, we can draw a quick gesture for the hand. I’m using some colors here — you can start with some pencils or colored markers if you like!

Each line is the same length as the other. One line is the gesture for the palm, and the other is the gesture for the middle finger!

Next, draw in the shapes for the palm. The palm gets narrower near the wrist. Make sure that one side goes out farther than the other — this makes space for the pinky finger.

Now, the blue line is a bounding box for the fingers. Don’t do the details yet! It is important to leave some room to breathe as you draw the area. Again, look how the blue area gets narrower as you go towards the fingertips.

Let’s do the thumb next. It’ll be on the side opposite the pinky. There are three main sections:

1: A triangle like base
2: This section can be a rectangle, but hides underneath triangle 1.
3: The thumbtip!

Now that we’re starting on details like the thumbtip, let’s look at the details of the fingers.

The grey line from our palm gesture is where the knuckles will go. Take a look at your hand, and you’ll see that the knuckles are where the hand bends!
The red dots are where the skin ends. The skin protects the knuckles. It makes the fingers look a little shorter, but remember the knuckles later when bending the hand!
Lastly, in blue, we have the fingers. The middle finger centers on the gesture. The red dots help us plan ahead for spacing out the fingers!

ps: the pinky finger is really short — poor little thing!

From here on out, it is time to finish the drawing! Use your Sakura Micron or ink pens to pick the final details. For example, look at how triangle 1 overlaps section 2 of the thumb. Because the triangle is on top, we ink on the skin of the triangle rather than the section. This helps the section hide “under” the triangle.