Exercise 0F: How to Draw Hands 2

Hello there! You learned the basic proportions and parts for drawing the hand in the last lesson. You learned how to draw the hand from the top, held in a flat position.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use basic cubes and cylinders as those parts, and then pose the hand in different ways!

Let’s start by refreshing our mental picture of all the parts…

In red, we have the palm and gesture for the fingers. Blue is for the thumb and, lastly, green is for the fingers.

And, since we’re going into 3D, I have an important fact to tell you up front: The palm is curved! Take a look at this “front” view of a palm and thumb!

Let’s jump into the procedure that we use for drawing the hand, with gesture first! Since the hand is going to be pointing out of the screen a little, we won’t have the full length for the gestures. But, we will still have the proportions.

Next, we add in the widths for the palm, remembering to save space on one side for the pinky finger. Notice the curving palm!

Now let’s work on the thumb. There are three parts: the triangle base, the cylinder middle, and the thumbtip. First, the base…

Draw in the triangle part as in the top view, and then extend from the corner to add some depth. It’s tucked behind the palm in this view, so you don’t have to draw all the lines.

Now, let’s do the middle and thumbtip. Think of the three thumbpieces separately — notice how the thumbtip covers the face of the middle, and the middle covers the face of the triangle.

The fingers come next, and are also done with cylinders. Think about the base of the fingers first — draw them in as circles on the front face of the palm. You can use these like the “red dots” in Part 1 which help space apart the fingers. Now, think about the lengths of the fingers… Middle finger the longest, pinky the shortest. I’ll mark them with some green dots to remind me later.

When you draw the fingers, remember that each has 3 sections (just like the thumb!). So, for each finger, draw in little cylinders that overlap each other, with some curves to mark where they could bend.

If you want to draw a clenched fist, you can imagine those finger sections bending down and curling over… The first section shows, but the next two sections would just hide underneath!