Draw Better Hands Now

hey everyone i've got a clip here from the animated movie klaus when i push play watch the hands specifically okay here we go new postman smirensburg which is on an island which is surrounded by water which i need a boat to get to which you have are we starting to connect the dots did you catch the amount of hand poses there it's pretty remarkable i mean we all know that hands are tough to draw but whoever animated this can't just draw hands they can draw hands like it's nothing and we want to get to this level do we not so i've got a few concise chapters here that will help demystify hands we'll begin with some 3d rough-ins here in this 3d program i have a flat plane let's do a quick drawing here most of you should be able to draw this no problem just a rectangle with a bit of perspective all right i'll tweak that 3d form here a bit and let's try and draw this i have to make sure that hump is looking right and i'll use some of those grid lines to draw over the form and help me understand the perspective here from there i can be more sure of myself alright good i'll tweak the 3d camera view and try drawing the same form from this angle the added difficulty here is that we can now see the top side and bottom side of the form but just like before the grid lines will help me understand the 3d structure also shading in anything underneath to further clarify that it's good practice to try and see through the form and make sure your lines are tracking and connecting properly sometimes you'll want to draw those invisible lines which i'll do here as the form is getting more complex now so some of these lines are not actually visible to me but they help me track form in 3d space i'm also drawing grid lines that are invisible again this is all helpful in feeling out that 3d space all right let's do one more here tweak the 3d model and in this drawing i'm doing the same thing tracking what's behind getting those grid lines in shading what's underneath and it's looking good i put together a little page of these for you to study from go ahead and pause the video if you like but back to this this drawing here reminds me of a hand already this exercise gets at one of the reasons hands are so tough there's lots of twisting and bending of the form and because of that it's very common to see both the palmer and dorsal side of the hand simultaneously this brings us to chapter 2 where i'd like to go over some hand structure let's talk about how the skeleton informs the contours of the hand if we shoot a line down the pinky side the bones allow it to continue pretty uninterrupted on the thumb side that's not the case the first break happens here at the very base of the thumb then that line continues at a sharp angle as the bones form our opposable digit these bones on the thumb side are near the surface go ahead and feel them right now on your own hand let's go back and look at one of these hands notice how that structural information informs the drawing due to those bones and angles there's a lot more space on the thumb side than on the pinky side the same observation holds up on the dorsal side of the hand that characteristic difference in shape between the thumb side and the pinky side looking at the thumb side it's almost like the letter l we're going to be using that l shape a lot in this lesson okay back to this drawing you might wonder what this little blip is on the pinky side that's muscle not bone more of that muscle group is visible on the palmer side of the hand the other major muscle group visible only on the palmer side of the hand forms that familiar mound of flesh around the thumb okay so let's do a series of partial hand drawings combining all the information we've learned so far i'm not drawing the thumb or fingers as we haven't covered that yet but with our 3d rough-in studies and some general knowledge of where the bones and a few muscles lie you should be able to distinguish between the palmer and dorsal side of the hand as well as the overall dimension and flow of the hand worth a reminder that when you're seeing the palmer side of the hand those two muscle groups contribute a lot of volume and i kind of define that volume with those grid lines that i'm using lightly over the drawing also i'm using that l shape in all of these to differentiate between the thumb side and the pinky side when you do these studies i recommend keeping them loose and rough but do a lot of them doing lots of repetitions is what trains your brain rather than perfecting one drawing all right the next bit of hand structure has to do with the fingers i'll plot a point at each fingertip and look at this graceful arc that happens and here's the interesting thing i'll replot those points at the base of the fingers and now it's apparent that it's a rhythm the same arc transposed this is also true for the dorsal side plot the fingertip points and draw an arc which transposes down kind of flattens a bit to describe the knuckle line look at how that rhythm is applied in these drawings here's the arc at the fingertips and the transposed arc at the base of the fingers acknowledging these simple curves will really help you develop your drawing using all the tools we've talked about it's pretty cool to see how quickly these concepts come together this rough hand drawing has gesture form volume and proportion speaking of proportion where the fingers begin on the palmer side is not the same point as on the dorsal side that line's got to come back quite a ways to hit the knuckles proportionally it's about a 50 50 split from wrist to knuckle to the end of the longest finger on the dorsal side but on the palmar side the palm gets much more space so from this view here the fingers hinge predictably at the knuckles but this view is more tricky the joint is now hidden by flesh so we get these characteristic folds in the skin now these folds differ from person to person but usually there are two prominent ones the fold closest to the fingers is the one directly opposite the knuckles that fold is a great landmark when you're roughing in hands on the palmer side and remember to make sure it's rhythmically paired with the arc at the fingertips at this stage in your practice it's helpful to keep the hand poses very open it just keeps the form easy to understand and you can practice those proportions and arcing rhythms with a little more ease things do get a bit more complex as the hand does different poses but don't worry we'll get into that in the coming chapters so again at this stage i'm not drawing the thumb other than the bones and muscles we've already looked at and i'm only indicating the fingers by virtue of those arcing rhythms but as you can see it's not hard to imagine the finished hand from here which is pretty exciting so i want to move into chapter 3 and talk more about the thumb it has two important landmarks this joint here which is in the middle of that l shape we talked about and is responsible for moving the thumb laterally it's a nice landmark because the bone is very close to the surface which means it'll usually show up in your reference and the second landmark is this joint here with which we can do some finer articulation the thumb itself is wide at this joint and tapers down at the end but maintains a squarish appearance the thumb is deceptively simple if i asked you to mark off the front versus the side if i'm thinking of a simple box i can pretty easily tell that this is the corner but what about from this view where we can see more of the bottom of the thumb the perspective becomes tricky here i would draw the line like this see how the top plane is getting cut off there at the end you know what this reminds me of the perspective on a canoe see how the top of the canoe is hidden near the front you know if i kind of warp this onto the thumb yeah something like that when drawing the thumb from this angle i find it helpful to work out that broad canoe base first now watch this the joint comes out from behind it from here i'll just work out the shape remember how the palm had those wrinkles opposite the knuckle the thumb has them too and i'm using them to describe the form from there i can track the bones with that l shape and here i'll throw in some quick shading mainly to separate the top plane of the thumb from the side and bottom planes here's another example with the hand on the bottom there the thumb is for shortened which makes it even harder to draw but i'll start with that l shape and then i'll find that next joint and notice how i'm drawing over the form like grid lines describing dimension i'll do the exact same thing with the thumbnail it's curvature going over the form therefore describing the form these are the grid lines i'm talking about very useful for understanding that three dimensionality from here i'll just rough in the rest of the hand again using tools and observations we've talked about already so you see how the thumb is bent back like this that's a very natural state looking back at our klaus screenshots literally every thumb is bent back like that and you might think oh it's a cartoon it's exaggerated and sure the shapes are exaggerated but the poses aren't if you're like me and you watch people's hands when they talk i know it's weird you'll see the bent back thumb happening far more often than not so practicing the canoe effect and really knowing where those joints go that's integral to the quality of your hand drawings thankfully it's a bit easier when the thumb is bent inward like this i'll start off with the l shape the joint landmarks drawing over the form like grid lines wherever i can when the thumb is bent look for this kind of crow's foot shape to help describe the flesh bunching up and speaking of bunching up when the thumb moves in toward the palm like this those two palmer muscle groups bunch up this will often cause a pretty straight line between them going to quickly throw in some shading here to describe the roundness of those muscle groups and notice it's the thumb muscle group that's the most voluminous of the two on the dorsal side of the hand look at how the lateral movement of the thumb creates this little lump here that's another major muscle visible only on the dorsal side it's a common mistake to miss it and suddenly the thumb is too close in i found it helpful to study these studies by disney artist jin kim where he shows how including that muscle can add volume weight and realism to the hand you notice how the thumb is pressed inward on all these poses that's a situation that brings out the full volume of that muscle alright that about wraps it up for the thumb let's move to chapter 4 and talk about the fingers before we do that though a quick announcement this video is sponsored by the great courses plus if you enjoy learning on your own time then welcome to the netflix of online courses the great courses plus is a subscription service providing on-demand viewing with access to thousands of great courses certain to meet the needs of even the most diverse interests now i do a lot of art so i'm trying to better myself in other areas like cooking each course has a comprehensive trailer you can check out you can look at reviews and descriptions and scroll through the chapters of the class to see what it has in store i'm going through this course right now but i've just finished this one it's a fascinating look at how our brain has learned to respond to color professor lidwell approaches color differently than an artist typically would but i'm already finding ways to incorporate this evolutionary color theory into my own paintings i have a feeling i'll be checking out a lot of these courses and if you'd like to do the same you can start a free trial right now at thegreatcoursesplus.com marcobuchi or click on the link in the description below to start your free trial at the great courses plus okay so we're moving on to the fingers you can boil fingers down into a series of cylinders but are you catching the mistake here the start of that cylinder should be more like this due to the palmer side of the hand getting more real estate next you see these two divisions here those are for the two finger joints and check this out remember that arcing rhythm i'll now raise that arc back to the top and look how perfectly it tracks through those finger joints i call this the wi-fi principle and it's always made it stick for me proportionally and from the dorsal side the middle joint divides the finger in half then the upper joint comes in just a little over halfway in the upper segment but on the palmer side the two joints appear to split the finger into thirds remember this is because the proportions are different on each side of the hand okay so this is a good starting point but in the real world you get views of the hand more like this first despite the foreshortened perspective here that arcing rhythm still holds up and now just so we can see exactly what we're doing with these cylinders i'll just trace them over top of the reference i'm trying to stay mindful of where the finger starts on the palmer versus dorsal side and placing those cylinder divisions at each finger joint and once again the locations of the joints are easily identified thanks to the folds in the skin okay so the perspective has skewed the proportions but the wi-fi is still connected also the fingers will almost always overlap each other in perspective it's typically a cascading effect you know a little overlap on the closer fingers a little more overlap in the middle distance and the most overlap furthest away when the finger is bent the flesh bunches up and we get this characteristic v shape between the joints this can pretty easily be added to the cylinders i'm looking at the pinky finger here and i'm constructing it first in three cylindrical segments and then i'll go over this with a darker line and find the actual contours the finger isn't fully bent here so it's more of a softer v-shape or maybe a u-shape the cool thing about the fingernail here is it's a built-in opportunity to show the orientation and perspective of the form in fact let's look at the fingertip joint a little closer i start with a cylinder-ish drawing but it's kind of boxed off like this this gets us thinking about the planes of the fingers now you could just start with boxes altogether but i find starting with cylinders and boxing them off later is faster okay so i'm putting the fingernail in now and this is like a mini form study think of the fingernail as a series of dimensional grid lines not so different than the exercise we did at the very beginning of this lesson okay next thing you see this slope here this is embedded in the bones where the joint itself tends to sit high and the form slopes a little before rising back up to the next joint these joints have the ability to bend back a little bit too notice the gesture line here our fingers are quite flexible especially that fingertip joint it essentially ensures that each finger will have a built-in gesture to it and no finger will ever just be dead straight so let that gesture define the fingers early also the dorsal side proportions are laid out and from the dorsal side we can see that webbing between fingers and that's just the edge of the longer palm seen from the dorsal side from this view remember to overlap that webbing as the finger extends past it to the knuckle from the palmer side i'll map out my proportions and then when i design the fingers i'll make sure they have a bit of gesture embedded in them and i'll just play with different gestures and shapes to see what fits best reminder that on the palmer side the fingers appear to be split in thirds and from this view the webbing between the fingers is still there although it's much less apparent and while we're seeing this view i want to point out the whole thumb assembly overlaps the palm this helps give the hand depth and with that let's move into the final chapter and draw some hands i'll start with this milk call hand milt call was an old school disney animator by the way famous for his good draftsmanship anyway i've got the thumb bones and muscle groups worked out which allows me to gauge the proportions and rhythm of the fingers the fingers are tricky here because due to the perspective they overlap quite a bit so my plan is if i can get the pinky correct i can use that as a reference point as i then progressively draw what's behind it i'm using the finger joints as a way of checking myself and now that everything is laid in i can be much more confident in evaluating the whole thing and finding those final lines that little bit of shading there is just to further push out those 3d forms alright this is one i'd previously studied from milk call although i'm drawing it from imagination now there's a bit of foreshortening and finger overlap to deal with and there's also something here that's common with hand poses you'll often see the index finger doing its own thing and the remaining fingers kind of clumping together and when fingers clumped together they don't line up like soldiers they often kind of nuzzle into or rest on top of each other i like to think of it like how rabbits hang out alright my index finger has all kinds of problems here i think the knuckle is too high causing the entire finger to sit too high so late in the game here i'm gonna fix it and immediately this sits much better with the structure and still satisfies the idea of the index finger breaking away from the group all right let's move on to another one this one from reference again there are those fingers nuzzling together like rabbits it takes practice to draw that because there's so much hidden information but once you get the hang of it your hand poses look so much more natural anyway i worked out the wrist and thumb connection first you know that l shape we've been constantly referring to and now i can work on fitting those fingers into the structure speaking of structure i'm always interested in drawing over the form wherever i can remember those grid lines the hand gives you many opportunities to incorporate that kind of thinking the joints the folds the muscles they can all be used to enhance that 3d structure anyway at this point in the drawing i'm just putting on some finishing touches a darker line here a darker line there a bit of tone these are about five minute drawings by the way although i think this one here was even faster no reference on this one just trying to invent a very flexed type of pose and again that will allow me to work on the gesture of each finger my proportions are off so let's fix that there we go that's better coming up here i'm going to change the angle of the wrist did you see it i really think that helps sell the tension in this pose also remember due to perspective those fingers are going to overlap each other another reminder even though it's not that visible in this pose this muscle still informs the drawing alright don't be scared of heavily foreshortened hands like this just use the tools connect the wi-fi draw the grids gesture out the thumb and fingers if it helps i'm building finger by finger here so i can get the overlap right that's one of the things that foreshortening makes difficult those overlaps are very specific even the slightest shift and your whole structure is off notice that the whole drawing is equally rough those fingers are constructed with cylinders which i'm now refining into something more finger-like also i can't see the knuckles from this view but it's helpful to imagine those fingers connecting at a common knuckle line and just a little scribbling of tone here on the bottom planes of things just to help clarify that 3d construction okay in this one i want to show you a type of hand pose that happens often in animation it uses that idea of the index finger doing its own thing and the other fingers being grouped except more specifically the middle and ring finger are grouped almost as one mass maybe a tiny bit of separation here at the joints and here at the fingertips but treating them as one makes them faster to draw which of course is very helpful in animation anyway and then the pinky finger will kind of follow the group while also breaking off and doing its own thing but not enough to take the spotlight away from the index finger it's a bit of a formula but the hand pose can still look pretty natural alright no hand lesson would be complete without a clenched or fist type of pose so here we go notice the rhythms are already in place now i haven't explicitly said this yet the number one mistake people make with hands is that they pose each finger symmetrically but that never happens with the real hand in a fist for example the volume of that thumb muscle group pushes the index finger and middle finger up conversely the ring finger and pinky finger they press up against a thinner muscle group so they can extend downward more and when you track those changes remember the rhythmic arcs another thing i want to mention in poses like this the l shape of the thumb bones is pretty hard to see but you can still imagine the end of the wrist about here tracking to this joint here and then tracking to this joint here and there's that l shape this harkens back to the 3d rough-ins exercise where we learned to see through the form and that should just about do it for this lesson now there is more to cover about hand poses and if you'd like to see a follow-up video just on that let me know in the comments i want to quickly thank my patrons for all their generous support and as usual i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Marco Bucci

Views: 484,458

Keywords: Marco Bucci digital painting, how to draw hands, drawing tips, animation keyframing, character poses, 2D animation, 3D animation, draw realistic style, stylized art, character design, visual development art, concept art skill, illustration tutorial, how to draw comic book, draw Disney, marvel superhero art, DC comics, how to shade drawings, digital painting layers, art tips and tricks, drawing hacks, professional artist, digital art tricks, draw on ipad, sculpting tips

Id: XBMQ-H-qUVk

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/thelryan]

He’s able to render a bunch of different planes and shifting it to practice drawing through forms(I think it’s called?)

I’d love more practice doing this or other exercises to learn this concept it’s teaching