Please. Someone. Anyone.

How the heck do you draw hands?!

Anyone out there have some easy tips?? I'm pretty hopeless at this point...

Here's a short tutorial that uses the steps I was taught. There's some other really good tutorial videos listed alongside this one, as well. Mostly drawing hands (and feet) just takes practice, lots of practice. Probably some muttered obscenities will be involved. Just say it's part of your "process".

I think the piece of advice that helped me most is to learn about the muscles and bones in the human hand. It really makes a big difference when you're drawing them, since you'll know which ways the fingers can go, and how they affect the wrist & rest of the arm. Length and size of the hand are also very important. Even if your fingers are too skinny or your palms are too thick, if you get the basic dimensions right, it won't look awkward

Hope that helps!

Eh, actually there are no easy tips or short-cuts to drawing hands. Believe me I've looked everywhere for them.

Inali's video is good for basic construction but you'll trip up if you try drawing the hand in other poses that are more dynamic.

Here are some basic tutes from Deviant that use the hand bones and basic wire constructs to figure out the hands.

Wire Hand Construct
Hand - Bones Construct

The only other thing I can suggest is learning the basics of the hand for example which fingers are the longest, shortest, and the number of joints in each. It makes it easier if you're using the wire-construct method to draw hands. Then you don't worry about the circles you just draw bendy lines that tell you naturally where the joints/hinges in the fingers are.

It's easier for me.

Also I suggest you do some quick and dirty sketches of hands in different poses using Pixeylovely's timed sketch sessions. It's basically photos of hands and feet that change every 30 - 60 seconds or over a couple minutes. You can pause photos too.

I use it to practice basic anatomy and body proportion along with hands in quick and dirty practice sketches.

It's helped to speed up my art too.

Hilariously so, and that's only after using it for a week.

Scary.

The hands and feet tutorial is here: http: // artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/hands-feet-practice/

(Take out the spaces after the http:)

I won't post a working link as the site does contain nude-model shots for figure and pose drawing/reference - So that part of the site has an M-Tag.

~ Pyre

Thanks everyone! Hopefully with all of these references, I will be able to draw Sesshy's hand without it looking like a dead jellyfish.

little late but these are all tutorials that have helped me in some way: sugar0o.deviantart.com/favourites/8312166/Tutorials-and-stuff-like-that-there

sugar0o wrote:
little late but these are all tutorials that have helped me in some way: sugar0o.deviantart.com/favourites/8312166/Tutorials-and-stuff-like-that-there



Not late at all: working on my dead squid right now...

-And thanks! -Your work is amazing, FYI

Ways I go about it is, well, I really just uses my own hands as a ref and DesignDoll (a very nifty posing program by Terawell!) can help a lot whenever it's difficult to pose/hold my hands in a certain way.

Basic rules for drawing a hand is generally:

-fingers are the similar/same length as your palm. Two halves of whole sort of deal.
-hands are usually similar length of the top of your head to the chin.
-start with the basic shapes first. I prefer the square for palms and rectangle for each part of finger(s) and go from there. Some people like triangles and circles instead though, and that's fine. Use whatever shapes that will help you.

Once you get that down, people tends to develop their own rules with drawing hands along the way imo. Some prefers cartoonish hands, some like realistic hands, or in between. It's really worth playing with to suit your needs/wants.

So, all of the suggestions good Dokugians here are pretty good to try, especially the video tutorials. You can get some ideas of how these artists does their hands. Good luck and hope you can get the hands down soon!

I've a question for Pyreite. You said you did quick gestures, right? And saw improvements in a week? I'm curious, how long did you hold a session in a day? Half an hour each day? I've been thinking about doing them more often, but I have no idea how long I should do it. Thanks for any reply.

FantomuAiShi wrote:

I've a question for Pyreite. You said you did quick gestures, right? And saw improvements in a week? I'm curious, how long did you hold a session in a day? Half an hour each day? I've been thinking about doing them more often, but I have no idea how long I should do it. Thanks for any reply.

Hiya Fantomu,

Yups quick gestures, or drawing sessions from the timed ones. About ten minutes to half an hour for five to six quick sketches, pausing in between. I was using the site mainly to practice doing basic construction, without the finishing details, since that's what I find the most difficult.

Like how to draw hands or feet or the body in different poses using ovals or boxes and such for proportion control.

I can only concentrate for ten minutes to half an hour on practice sketches at a time. So I tried to use that time every day at some point. Time of day didn't matter, just making sure I spent some time sketching.

Nods I noticed improvement when I started drawing recently again.

It was easier and faster for me to adapt my basic oval base constructed on a pose for a running dog. A piece of Sesshy art.

I was quite surprised since I'd struggled before to do just that in earlier art.

I need to get back into it too.

>.>

Been lax for the last week.

~ Pyre