HOW TO DRAW HANDS - EASY ANIME STEP BY STEP

artwork critiques photoshop files and reference sheets are all available on my patreon well hello there guys and girls my name is mikey welcome back to my room it's time for another tutorial and today we're going to be taking a very simple very basic look at how to draw hands for anime manga cartoons any form of illustration really we're going to keep the hands simple and basic so that we don't give ourselves a headache for just starting out but just good enough hopefully so that you can draw hands for your own characters without them looking wrong so if you're following along at home i've just got a few sheets of printer paper to give myself a soft surface to work on super cheap disposable mechanical pencil because i'm too lazy to sharpen things and i'm going to start off with a ruler which you don't need just to give us a quick idea of proportions a very quick proportion guide shape so what i'm doing here is i'm just drawing a little thin rectangle somewhere here and i'm only using a ruler and guiding this in so that it shows up nice and clearly for you guys but i just want to talk about the relationship of the fingers to the main mass of the hand and i'm imagining this rectangular shape is two almost squares they're still a little bit taller than they are wide sitting on top of each other very roughly halfway now this is going to be our area for our finger tubes and this is going to be our area for the main hand paddle i'm using the latin terms also there's going to be the thumb flap but we'll talk about that in just a moment the main thing i do when i'm drawing hands is firstly think about the main paddle center area and it's going to be a slight rectangle shape just a little bit taller than it is wide but also i'm actually going to turn it into a bit of a polygon by going just to the right hand side of middle and i'm just going to actually give this a line which goes up here and creates an uneven pentagon and i'm going to be very rough and very kind of heavy with my line work here so do forgive me and then come back down here so i'm putting an uneven triangle just over the top of that to give it a bit of a pentagonal shape and i can start to imagine that actually maybe we're going to come in a little bit here just in a little bit here just shaving off the edges towards the bottom and in a very similar way when you line up your fingers close together they're not perfectly going forward they're also coming in just a little bit so i'm going to give myself another guideline it just slightly tapers in here and slightly tapers in here not too much but just a little bit we've talked about this before in our how to draw fists video which is probably linked up on screen right now as well now that thumb flap basically what i like to do is with our bottom area down here i go just below halfway down here and do another triangle not too deep but just sweeps off to a point below the halfway section and then comes right back around and in and i'm working with a lot of straight lines right now just to give you guys an idea of a form that i tend to have in my mind when we're doing this and then later on i tend to then start to firm things up or start to decide where we've got sharper and smoother curves but we're going to get to that now i'm just going to make sure that this hand is attached to a wrist so i'm just imagining a wrist shape shooting off to the side we're going to cut it off right about there it's nice just to have a little bit of wrist connected to your hands when you draw them with your practice just so that you kind of are going to be able to connect them to arms much more easily when you do more full characters later and then we're going to talk about this little flow this line here and the reason i've given it that bump towards the middle is it's very loosely following the lines of the knuckles here's our main swearing finger in the middle there a pointing finger on the right and so on but this shape i'm actually going to really accentuate the depth of that angle when we go to the top now this other rectangle helps me understand very loosely that the longest finger is probably going to reach about this point roughly the same distance between here to here as we've got from here to here very conveniently but now i'm really going to go in and sweep down much more firmly with a much sharper angle than these areas here and same thing over on this side here right down there and that very loosely gives us the overall silhouette and form even though it's just a flipper at the moment of the hand itself now when it comes to the thumb area i like to just pop up just about here for the first part of the joint and again always reference your own hand if you can take loads of photographs of your hand in different positions be your own kind of reference pack it's really helpful and then i'm just going to pop a line across here here's our first joint area and then the inside of the thumb i tend to curve it out a bit concave and then the back end a bit convex and i make sure that that finishes just up here at the most i'm just going to come up here and sweep out just like this flatten a little bit at the end sweep back just for now just like that and then with our fingers in the middle there's another thing we can keep an eye on this area here from our knuckles that goes up to the tips it's going to be divided into three sections where you've got the free parts of your fingers curling around and doing stuff but this lower section goes almost halfway up the finger and then these two are smaller and smaller so i'm going to go almost halfway up the main middle gap and i'm going to just put in this very light line again now we not we aren't actually bending these fingers so we don't need to worry too much but it's always a good idea to know where these joints are loosely going to be and halfway again still with the middle part being a little bit longer than the end part just like so and then now we can divide up to the fingers themselves so what i like to do is basically just go halfway across our hand area here and then i'm going to be a bit more generous for these two fingers than i am for these two so i'm going to go halfway just plus a little bit as well and if i bring a line that goes relatively straight up here just like this i've basically split the hand into two groups of two fingers and as long as i'm making sure that i'm tapering these lines ever so slightly in as i go up we can split them again so let's split off the ring finger from the pinky finger very loosely over here and now we can split off the swearing finger from the pointing finger very lightly over here so these are just some very basic construction shapes but this is giving me a bit of a guideline for the hand overall and helping me understand the relationship of the different bits of these hounds right across here we've got all of our knuckle joints and so on but i just want to show you what i like to do instead of curving over here to show these joints or describe this as a bit of a cylinder i like to kind of use some slightly sharper lines because it forces me to get some energy and angles into the fingers early on and then i can decide to bring it back later and all i'm talking about here is really just going up in these loose areas and very lightly i just kind of triangle these off just a little bit here a little bit there and this just helps guide my decision making later if i start to actually do other things with the hands but it also forces me just to really start to break down these shapes as well this one's a little bit uneven excuse me let me just come back up here and also we're going to get some tips of fingers in so i'm just going to very firmly just put in some relatively hard edges there to get the tip of this finger going and then much further down on this side let's just use that guideline at the top remember this is a guide for us we can work beyond it or through it if we want to the ring finger is about as long as the pointing finger it's just a little bit weaker let's sweep that in and i'm trying to sweep some relatively firm lines because it's for hesitancy and uncertainty on your lines which is part of why drawing hands can be a bit of a nightmare and they can look a bit rubbish so again i'm just going to start off with a pinky right up here and this one i'm going to sweep this in and really cut in here to make this much thinner and just bring that in so i've got my guideline here but i've decided to come all the way in on that side and also you'll notice here that there's almost a little bit of webbing between your fingers the underside of your hand is nice and flat and clear but just here you can see that it actually all reaches back and what i just like to do to help keep that in mind is i just describe the fingers as going up the surface curve here just like so over to the back of a hand and that kind of indicates where we've got our knuckle joints and then everything is in terms of a bone structure leading back in towards the wrist but there we've got a very basic idea of how i break down some hand shapes and what we're going to do now is actually use that to have some very common hand shapes especially when you're drawing your own characters and they're just standing there very common hands that we can start to stick on the arms for poses you probably already have so now this time without the guidelines we're going to start to use some of these building blocks again i'm going to have a hand which is just like this splayed out and open i'm just getting a bloody good look at mine right now and then i'm going to map that out roughly down here so let's say that we've got the bottom part of the hand about here i like to start from where it meets into the arm so i'm just going to make an arm disappear somewhere off there and again i'm going to be as quick as possible um which means it's probably going to be a bit rough but this is just to keep the time of the video down for you guys to follow along at home and then again i'm just going to get almost filling in a square space but just a touch longer here's our main central paddle of the hand before we go into the tubular pointy bits again using the best latin equivalent you don't need to know over technical terms because i certainly don't so then i'm just going to bring it up a little bit here down a little bit here towards the smaller fingers and then we're going to map that thumb shape so i'm going to go more than halfway up this edge to around about here and about halfway into here and give us a nice generous bit of thumb muscle just inside of there and we've got all sorts of lines and wrinkles and lifelines of bits inside the palm of our hand when you're doing even basic hands it's good to get maybe this line in to a certain degree maybe even this one as well just to show we're looking at the inside part of the hand but then again i'm just going to sweep out a triangle to around about here that's going to be our paddle area just like so and then i can come up a little bit with the thumb relatively nice and thick to around about there and again i'm going to sweep out for the back side of the thumb over where the nail is and curve a lot more generously back in for the inside end of the thumb and then if i'm going to have the finger splayed i still know that this distance is going to be vaguely the limit of our lead finger distance around about here and i'm just going to follow this kind of action but now really splay it out from what we've already got going on in the hand so i might have the pointing finger coming up to about here then we've got the swearing finger in the middle over there coming out following this plane down to the other finger and then right down to the little finger might just be coming somewhere further in here and then i'm going to start to join them up again now firstly some very simple guiding tube lines one here just up there and then back to around about here i'm going to give myself a gap before i then do the next one sweeping up here just like so then a gap again as we go over to this guy sweep over here follow that way in a tapering ever so slightly and then a small gap again as we get to our little finger around about there and now i'm just going to use this kind of similar shape feeling to help work my way up each of these fingers i'm going to just sweep up here almost halfway and just start to get this little kind of pointing to show here's a bit of surface area here's a bit of separation in the structure of each one and each time i'm sectioning this off so that each finger is a little bit shorter or each finger section is a bit shorter than the one before it and then here going almost half up sweeping out a generous portion and then up again let's come back and in and then up again once more to curve off i'm using relatively firm straight lines when i say curve things off to keep that energy for the moment as i describe this hand doing the same up this finger as well one two and three and i do actually tend to keep things very sketchy and loose like this when i'm doing hands because i do struggle with them and i find it easier to work then on top a little bit later but keeping this looser energy and keeping yourself loosened up when you're trying to get these forms is going to be massively helpful as well don't be too tight this is very useful to guide but you're going to want to just really observe and sketch and observe and sketch and then let's do the little finger one i'm gonna go a little bit flat here two here we go let's give that some more point and then free our little finger off there but i'm not going to make these fingers appear to roll over the top area of the hand like we've got the knuckle area here because we're looking on the inside edge the only other line would be another line that starts from about the second finger here and also just kind of sweeps across the palm but i would make that the lightest line out of all three if i'm trying to describe what's going on on the inside but i would also just bring the muscle of that thumb just down in and create a little bit of a divot of a shape here as well and let the hand come on the outside now of this guide we've got a bit more mass it usually sweeps up around about there like so so next up let's have a look at a hand maybe side on in a bit of a spear technique because this also has thickness so let's have a wrist that comes maybe off of here i'm going to give myself a through line for just hopefully guiding the arm all the way down to the point of the fingers something like so and then let's make part of this a wrist around about here i'm going to be as rough as ever so let's stop here just like so this is me cutting off the arm at the end and then again okay if i'm going to have this part sweeping all the way down to around about here let's say and that's going to be the main mass of the side of the palm of the hand that distance again is going to help me dictate that the fingers are probably going to work all the way over to there now for the back of the fingers for a good spear i'm actually just going to drop the line down a little bit before i then sweep it along and again must apologize for being so rough but let's go down here sweep along there and then i'm just going to now go one two free and i'm using these angled lines to really give the feeling of these digits having these sections and going into a point so here's our knuckle area just over here and then we've got loads of other stuff going on as well because we've got the thumb which is going to be around about here this is halfway down the hand area just past halfway point just like we've got here and there's a whole mass of muscle which is working up and then back around down to where the wrist actually meets in so i would actually describe this all as a lot of kind of curving muscular shapes but again i'm just sweeping into some firmer sharper lines firstly just to really kind of accentuate a lot of this and then we've got the thumb the first area of the joint goes to about here relatively nice and thick and then the tip of the thumb the last part goes right up into the first section of our finger around about here just like so and then you can imagine that you know the nail would be somewhere around about here if we're going to start putting them in but let's keep it as simple as possible for now then we've probably got some wrist joint area here i'm probably going to bring that wrist closer to this size coming off there i'm just going to erase this line there it's a little too thick but there we've got a little bit of a side on look as well so when you've got your characters standing up and the hands just resting down by this side it's going to look a bit like this this way but it's going to be a lot more relaxed so let's take a look at this we've got the arm just coming down here so again i'm just going to come down here a little bit for the arm leading into the wrist let's cut it off around about here i'm trying to work out how i'm going to fit all of our hands into the page space as well and then i'm going to do a similar thing that i did here starting over here i'm going to actually go out a little bit because when the hands not spear making a spear shape really locked and rigid it's a bit more relaxed it's going to curve around a little bit so i'm just going to let this sweep out a bit more to something like this and then let's stop about here and then this distance again is going to be round about to where the fingers start to trail off i'm going to bring it up just a little bit because those fingers will curve and i'm going to just imagine the thumb area as well so let's go just past halfway once more very similar to this we've got a load of mass for the thumb here but it's going to be a bit more opened out natural so this kind of area that's projecting out to waters for the thumb is going to come much further out here before it starts to just come down here then let's sweep that back in there and we're gonna have this area here this kind of curving shape gap there i know it's not quite in focus which is going to just be this line here just sweeping in showing a gap between the thumb and the fingers and then we can come down now with that thumb joint and just bring that nice and gently and maybe a little bit of a firmer line on this edge i'm not going to go full concave because it's a relatively side on thumb but i'll still take maybe a bit of an opportunity to bring the curve in on the inside edge just like so and then as we work down the fingers i'm actually going to imagine tracking from the back as in the top edge of the fingers is usually an area or a side where i imagine this to be straight lines if i'm simplifying whereas the inside edge of the fingers is where i've got all these pads where i start to think of these as curves so i'm still going to just straight line relatively down here for just almost halfway then another straight line joint in about there and then let's start to curve that in for the finger and then again i'm going to use these kind of trapezoid shapes to just bring these sections back which basically means let's have a line that comes here and i'm just going to go one bring that line in at an angle two start to section that off and three let's curl around for the tip of the finger just like so and maybe even then the second finger is going to go just past there we'll see just a tiny little bit of the same situation just happening up on the inside of the hand there then we've got the third finger doing another thing again barely separated out and then maybe the pinky is just going to be in a little bit more so i'm going to go a bit further up here work my way back up this time just to go one two three and then just show the inside edge of the hand coming up in there as well in fact let me just bring that inside edge just up a little bit more further because this hand is not just flat it's relatively convex it's working round as the hand is fairly casually just hanging down and that just allows me now to come back up to this thumb line where i'm using these hard angles i'm just going to bring that off into a bit more of a curve imagine how it just meets the joint of the wrist area up here and then we've got a hanging hand and again we will pop over this and start to redo these shapes in just a moment and then now let's have something a bit more dynamic let's have a hand that's coming out towards us still using these particular pentagonal base shapes so if we've got a hand that's reaching towards us i'm going to start roughly at the bottom again round about by the wrist and i'm still using this kind of pentagon feeling but i'm squeezing it down because of the force shortening as it leans over towards us so i'm going to go maybe up along this edge just like so out a little bit here i hope i'm giving myself enough space and then much further down around about here let's sweep that in it's coming towards us so it's looking a lot wider across this top area than it is at the base just to really kind of give us that feeling of kind of depth and reach and the first thing i'm going to do is get that from muscular area back in so starting a little bit above the halfway point working my way around even though it's much more shallow towards the middle just like so using some relatively straight lines even though i'm describing a lot of muscular natural curves just to get these shapes nicely defined in and this thumb is going to be reaching out and around the actual muscular area is probably going right down and around here and then the rest of the hand is up on this side and then we've got our kind of lifeline and bit that's going down and around there using this to describe a slightly concave feeling inside the hand itself and then i can just start to think right our thumb is going to be going right out over in this direction and then we're going to have the lead finger probably reaching right up here not too tall because it's foreshortened towards us and again i'm thinking about this line and i'm trying to give myself a very loose idea of where these fingers might travel out and around so i'm gonna sweep round here and i'm gonna just come in relatively shallow and all the way down here i'm imagining that even if the hand is splayed out there's an entire web of material between it and just trying to think about where that space is going to be occupied and just use that as a bit of a guide again so i'm going to be thinking once more about some very similar tubes because we're looking down over this cylindrical shape we're going to see a lot of that coming in here and then going after the top so i'm going to do one here and again these are our loose guides another one with a bit of gap between the fingers when they're splayed apart around about here which i'm going to take up to this point like so another one coming in a bit more directly towards us now around about here so this is gonna be a lot shorter just like so and then i'm gonna have the little finger drop right down almost to the same level as the thumb in fact so let's go right in now i've got this guide but i'm choosing to bring this in a lot further down here and then with the thumb i'm still thinking right the first part of that joint is coming out around about there and then the second part we're going to see the most of something like so reaching out like this and now i'm going to come back up and just start to use those kind of angular shapes to separate things off but this time i'm going to start with the tips of the fingers because they're much closer towards us and then work my way back towards the center of a hand much like if you want to draw somebody who's punching right towards a camera or kicking towards you the viewer you start off with the nearest part and work that limb back towards the main body and torso same with the fingers get your four short and closest bit placed and then map it backwards so let's get um this thumb shape in one two three this should be some nice curves but i'm still trying to think angular so that i can do this let's bring this back with a nice point let's do the same for the next part of the thumb just like so really give that some hard edge shape just so that i can get my head around all of these forms and i'm going to curve these fingers i'm going to curve up in here i'm imagining that we're seeing the straighter back edge a little bit more down this side and the softer curved parts hooking up and around here so i'm going to have our finger starting around about here and now it's the end finger which is going to be taking up a large amount of space just like so because it's foreshortened towards us the other sections are going to be diminishing with a bit of a hooking action there and another one there as it meets into the hand just like so straighter lines on this side more curves there and then we've got this area across for palm and then similar thing here let's have this coming down on this side really nice and foreshortened so i'm just really turning this into a shape that's stacking straight down there and then we're getting relatively wide as well with this kind of feeling of that foreshortening going down to the hand just like this and just like that get that perspective really kicking off and again that's really kind of squeezing that curve all the way around there this finger actually this firmer edge is going to come on this side now because this one's reaching a bit more out but it's right towards us so i'm really just going to fill most of this space with the tip of this finger coming out here and then a large part of remainder is the second section and then where it just meets into the hand that final part there and then for the final part of the finger this one i'm just going to keep this a little bit longer because this one's coming out at a bit more of an angle for the pinky bringing it back again with just these lines which give that feeling of a three-dimensional surface that's going away from us and that's kind of going to meet into the hand but it's also folding down so it kind of just comes in around about there and then we've got the front part of the palm i'm just mapping that up and into each section there and then the rest of the back of the hand up here just showing there's that thickness to the hand itself and then just coming back down here and i'm just going to give the hand a bit of muscle on the back side as well as the part of the thumb that's reaching up here like so bring that line a little bit firmer as it comes back up and in there but there we go already we've basically got this vague hand shape that's already kind of reaching forward towards us as well we've got our lifeline kind of squeezed in there we can get the other bit just traveling in very lightly in here as well if you'd like it to and we could use all sorts of techniques like shading and so on to really give it that feeling of pushing forward so i've given us just enough space i've worked this out um to have one more hand going and again i'm trying to think of some very common hand shapes for you guys to start off with and another one is that if you're drawing a lot of um luxurious anime ladies um you might want to get the hand in shot but it might just be a waist up shot the head and chest area so a good one is to have the hand reaching back and touching the collar bone touching the top of the boob touching the cheek this whole kind of oh my i do declare kind of hand that just comes back in repose so let's take a look at one of those um let's go here where i'm starting again with the wrist we're always growing out our hands unless we're doing something extreme like this from the wrist outwards so let's just go here and just cut the arm off around about here just like this lovely and then now i'm just going to have this hand going off in this direction and again i'm still doing the same thing even though we're a little bit collapsed and looking a little bit over to the side i'm still thinking of this slight pentagonal shape let's say it does fat before it comes all the way back down here we're looking a little bit side on it's going to have some thickness but we're not going to stress too much when we end up doing these organic shapes it's for shading and other things that really tends to define that in just a bit but i am going to tuck this back in just over the shape of a wrist a little bit as the arm comes down there and again just think about some lengths of things this distance is going to be vaguely this distance and i'm just dropping from this point already imagining where that's going to be and just thinking about that web out of fingers again so we're gonna have maybe the lead finger just going off to about there just again turning it into another flipper for the moment a big paddle uh the smaller finger trailing off to around about there and what you often get in a lot of anime hand poses and so on and it just looks very nice generally is the middle two fingers to be together with the first and little finger separated out it gives the hand a kind of relaxed natural feeling and keeps it just a bit more of an interesting series of shapes compared to four splayed out fingers now in this instance of thumb is on the other side it's lost behind everything that we're already drawing so great we don't have to worry about that let's get those fingers in i'm going to start off with what we're probably not going to see i'm going to start off with the far finger and then work my way back towards so there's a lot of foreshortening happening on this one it's disappearing just off to around about there it's really not going far the second one is a bit more side on so i'm gonna let us get a tube guide in that goes all the way around to about there and then the third finger right next to it being kind of companion guide finger a slightly tapering tube shape it's going to be about here and then a bit of the gap when we've got the hands displayed a bit more open a little finger just a tube shape it's going off there doing its own thing as well and then again just kind of turning that into some form to some shape i'm using some straight firm lines to hook around the back parts here just like this and then just like that and then to the end and then just giving it some bump for the underside and then a very similar thing as i reach up here i'm thinking right we're going over the center knuckle now so i might want to get some line there but just indicates that bump in that shape remember it's all going over these knuckle joints and sweeping all the way back in to the base of the hand and i'm just going to rotate this a bit to make it a bit easier for me and then i'm just going to go in and think right let's go here get that shape up there and again imagining this line that follows all the way around through everything let's get one section the next and the final part and then same up here but a bit further down one section the next the final part and then with the little finger as well just a little something there here and here and of course again these are the bits that you don't have to worry about you don't need to separate this out and draw this in but just thinking about where these areas are going to be it's going to help you decide later on if you want to start bending these fingers or doing anything else of interest as well let's just get that joint in there let's just erase a little bit of a wrist just up there and what i'm going to do now guys is now that we've got all these basic building blocks out of the way i'm just going to go back around this once firm up some of the um silhouettes of this and just firm up where i've got different edges and curves going on to kind of make these look from building blocks to a bit more like organic hands and i'll see you in a [Music] second [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey there guys and welcome back so yeah hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea of how we can start simplifying hands to make them a little bit more approachable for our own illustrations and if it helps you at all i will be scanning this in and adding it to the tutorials reference pack along with all the other sets which you can grab for just a dollar on patreon links of course below so let's take a quick look as you can see we've got the distance between the knuckle and the wrist roughly the same as the distance between the end and the tip of the longest finger of the hand that's a good bit of measuring for us already and we've broken this down into a roughly pentagonal shape with an extra triangle off the side which gives us this thumb we could certainly sweep this more into a curve but just for the sake of keeping things very simple and not worrying too much about the details of the hand i like to work in a lot of quick swift and hopefully confidently appearing gestures and lines to put all of this together when it comes to the side of a hand whether it's in a knife edge or just hanging down we've got the extra muscle area of the thumb and from the side it can just hang out a little bit lower remember of course the thumb of your hand can go all the way out and then hook all the way around and in it's opposable that's like a big deal for us people and then when it comes to a splayed open hand remember to have a little bit of a gap starting to appear between the fingers keep referencing your own hands look at loads of pictures of hands build up your library keep doing this as much as possible it's a really good habit and then of course you can get a little bit dramatic still using this basic thinking we've got still sitting inside here our pentagon kind of shape that's obviously a little bit shorter up on this lead side it goes a little bit longer down here the hand is still getting built around that form with the muscle of the thumb and really we've got three main zones every time we've got the main area of the hand we've got the fingers which might be splayed out so try to think about that curve to get all the tips aligned and we might have them all in together so just think about how they kind of go in a little bit and taper but as well as that main area in the fingers also you've just got that big curving area for the thumb muscle out on the side as well if you just break it down into those three main sections hopefully you're gonna find it's gonna make your life much easier so no excuses guys no more hiding the hands of your anime and manga characters and of course a great big shout out to the january patrons including isn't it romantic say no black silent lumberjack mumbles 45 dan nathan jai treylon b mike t and homonchi el thank you very much everybody for all of your support on patreon even just buying the basic reference pack for just a dollar it is in fact the only reason i'm able to keep making free tutorials on youtube because i don't want you guys to have to pay for this i just really want you to pick up a pencil and give drawing a try but of course that's a terrible business model so thank you so much again to the patrons for making it possible as for the rest of you thank you very much for clicking that subscribe button let me know what you'd like to see in the comments for the next video and i'll see you next time take care

Channel: mikeymegamega

Views: 581,605

Keywords: hands, easy, step by step, proportions, fingers, hand, reaching, relaxed, neutral, model, simple, beginner, construction, how to draw hands, how to draw hands easy, how to draw hands step by step, How to draw, how to draw girls, women, ladies, how to draw anime, anime drawing, manga drawing, tutorial, lesson, guide lines, anime drawings easy, anime feet, anime body, where to put, how to, draw, how to draw, sketch, design, anatomy, girl, figure, median

Id: 1FDrizAhPa8

Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021