How To Draw HANDS

this video is about drawing hands normally with these videos i say this video is all about drawing whatever it is that i'm drawing and really that's never true but it's especially not true with hands that are so incredibly complex and have so much range of motion so much expression and are so completely different to draw from one angle to another so this video is really more of a tips and tricks my general approach to drawing hands some things to be sure to avoid and what i hope are some good strategies for you to get better at drawing your hands i'm david finch i've been a comic book artist for over 25 years if you enjoyed this video please hit like and subscribe and be sure to share with your friends if you have any comments please leave them below and be sure to check the description below for my red sony cover from dynamite entertainment available on indiegogo right now in my batman catwoman number one exclusive variant cover available from comics sketchart.com so i'm going to go ahead and start with a very simple diagram of the hand here's where my a the palm of the hand comes off the wrist this would be the back of the hand really and then i'm drawing a curve for my fingers come out because your fingers don't come out of your hand in a flat line they come out in a curve your knuckles also move in a curve and then the tips of your fingers have that even more accentuated you can see that they're heavily curved and so i start with that here i'm going to draw a curve for my first set of knuckles my second set and then the tips of my fingers and then a bit of a triangle just back here for where my thumb projects out and i'll just draw a simple curved shape for my thumb so i've got a pad for my thumb here we'll go into that just a little bit more detail later on but just to start the thumb comes out of the hand just like this i like drawing a a bit of a not so much a ball but i guess a flattened ball for my wrist and the arm attaches in here and the reason i like to draw that kind of a shape in here as opposed to just a wrist connecting up is when you draw an arm from the side in the hand the hand actually rests quite a bit down from from the wrist so here would be the palm of my hand [Music] that the connection rides up into the into the arm like this and i'll draw my fingers and my thumb would come off like this and what you want to avoid is drawing a hand just do it the other way uh that comes off the wrist just flat and i'll draw the thumb on this side of the hand if you were to actually see a flat line all the way down from the arm to this point here at the knuckle you would actually have to do this so there's my arm my hand would actually ride up just a bit the fingers would ride up from there i'll draw my shape my thumb just like this so you can go flat there but your hand actually would have to bend up quite a bit in order to accommodate that when you i don't know if you can see that there but when it rests flat there's actually quite a bit of a a difference in the plane between your hand and your arm so something to be aware of another thing to be aware of i'm going to draw a shape for the back of my hand here my wrist will come into it just about here and it's got a curve and so this would be about the shape that i would use just like that but i don't want to actually go with that shape what i want to do is flatten it like this and so my fingers would actually come off of that shape or like this and so my knuckles would be here and then my fingers at the bottom would actually connect all the way down here this is obviously a pretty simplified hand but just get the point across that there's actually a real plane here it's a horrible drawing but hopefully it gets across the point that your knuckles actually rest quite a bit further in your hand than the webbing on the inside of your hand and you can really see it with my hand here so you want to make sure that that's something that you're capturing so if i draw a hand there's one finger mother finger [Music] and my knuckles are up here the webbing is all the way down here quick and ugly drawing to get the point across but you really want to make sure that you're establishing that plane and that you're not drawing a hand that basically looks like this [Music] and it's a very easy mistake to make so there's a hand with really no webbing at all and it really should be much more down here from here i want to cover the way that your fingers actually curve into your hand when you curl your fingers and so i'm going to draw a palm this time i'll draw an overall shape for my thumb where my thumb comes out of the bottom of the hand and if i straighten the fingers they come out of the hand just like this but when i curve them i'm going to curve my index finger and this is a really simple drawing i want to get enough of these points across as quickly as possible before we move into something a little more complex but you can see they all curve in toward the thumb the most natural way when you curve your hand they curve towards the thumb and that's so you can easily grab things with your hand and with your thumb you can actually curl your fingers down just flat and so here's my thumb and so that can work but it's actually a little bit easier to just bring in this outer knuckle so from the side there's the side of my hand the heel of my hand and i'm going to draw my index finger curving in and then my pinky is going to curve much more and so you see even though you're seeing the hand from the side my knuckles actually ride along and inward there and understanding that can just make your hands look a little bit more natural all right so i wanted to talk about drawing fingers and the way that i learned how to draw fingers really is just by drawing tubes which makes sense because they are basically tubes i can draw just kind of curving down it's like this and they're interconnecting tubes and i find that works but it's not actually really a practical way for me to approach it and it's something that i've kind of moved away from and so what i do is a bit more of a flattened shape and so it'll be just a little bit more like this [Music] and i just find that this graphically works a lot better for me but i also found something that really works for me is just to think of fingers as being very rigid on one side and then very soft on the underside and then connecting up like that and i could really get something that really looks like a pretty realistic finger with very little effort just by using that kind of a shape and so what i'm drawing there these are my knuckles i guess i need one more ridge for my main knuckle that connects to the fleshy part of the hand and it makes drawing fingers very very easy and so that's really much more the way that i approach it now something that's very important to remember when you're drawing hands also is that your fingers and you can see in my hand here tend to curve in toward each other in toward the center of your palm and so if i'm drawing a fist i'll draw a fist my thumb is going to be here wrapped underneath i'm going to wrap my fingers down like this the back of my hand and they all curve into each other so what you want to avoid is drawing a hand that looks like this all my knuckles are at the same height my fingers are all the same length and they're pointing all directly straight up and down so when you draw your fist and this will be directly from the front again your fingers all subtly come inward the back of your hand has a curve to it your center knuckle is going to be the highest and so you can draw your knuckles downward from there and then your fingers all have a bit of a wrap just like that and that will really avoid you ending up with the hand that looks very very phony in a fist and it's very simple just making sure to curve them inward as you go and making sure to curve the back of the hand and i'm also curving the bottom just a little bit too and i'm accentuating that curve by taking my index finger pushing it out a little bit and then my other fingers and then bringing them back and so this will be my middle finger here my third finger and then my pinky just like this and that looks much more realistic to how an actual hand bends than if i was to do the side of the hand just like this [Music] all exactly straight so you really need to be aware of those kinds of curves and the way that they affect your hand as you clinch your fingers together all right so i wanted to talk a little bit about finger anatomy and when i draw a finger like i showed earlier on i like to draw it as a bit of a flat shape with a lot of shape on the upper side and then much more curved on the underside that gives me my basic finger shape right there and so i'm going to go ahead and do that on a hand that i have lightly sketched in here much more curved on the underside draw a knuckle up here [Music] just finish out the fingers and once we get this in i want to talk about the way that the actual bones appear on the top of the knuckles because understanding the way that the bones work in the fingers and the padding below it is really all you need to be able to draw good realistic fingers so i'm gonna draw on a knuckle on this finger right here just as a bit of a round shape and then a knuckle here this is my main knuckle of the back of the hand another knuckle here just right here another one here and i'm just quickly defining in these as very simple shapes on the hand and then the bones of the hand basically look like this they make a bit of a curving pattern around the knuckles just like this i've got this bone defined at the top of the finger here this finger is actually going to overlap just a little bit on top of the finger below and there's always a little bit of folding of of your skin between your fingers which you can see on your own hand which is why using your own hand as reference is highly recommended so here's a shadow underneath my knuckle and then my overall bone shape up around the knuckle into the top portion of the finger here do the same thing here and then because this curves under i'm just going to shadow it out and i just find that that's a really good way to turn a form so i'm going to draw another knuckle here my first knuckle of the finger and the actual finger itself because this one's just a little bit more curled i'm getting a bit more of a bulge in here when you straighten the fingers out they get much flatter but when you when you bend your fingers this portion here pooches out just a little bit so it's kind of a good thing to try and get that in here and now i'm going to draw a couple of folds where the palm starts drawing my palm just back here shadow out underneath that knuckle again and i'm being sure to define basically this shape here on the top of the finger just like this draw another knuckle just right here and so i've got my actual knuckle that i'm shadowing and then around the knuckle i'm actually drawing the overall shape of the bone as it comes up over the finger and down into the lower portion this knuckle also [Music] push that out just a little bit because it's a little more bent and shadow under here and then one more finger finish it out and let me get this shadow defined properly here again a shadow under the knuckle just a bit of a definition of that shape of the bone another shadow here i'm gonna go ahead and define in the back of the hand by my major knuckle at the top of the hand here and then i can always go ahead and draw just a little bit of wrinkling on the back of the knuckle here so you want enough to define that shape in there but you don't want to go so heavy with it especially on a female hand i tend to avoid these almost entirely for women's hands i just like to keep them a little bit more clean looking and so that's really how i would go ahead and define my fingers so it really is my major knuckle shadow underneath it just like this my major knuckle sent my central knuckle i guess and then the overall bone shape around it and then another knuckle just like this and then the tip of my finger would be basically like this and that's really the way that i define my uh anatomical shapes the bone shapes on top of the fingers and obviously i want to keep this just a little bit more clean if you over extend these lines too much it can start to look a little fake so what you want to do is indicate them but don't draw all the way through and now to draw a thumb i'm gonna sketch in a shape for my thumb here [Music] a much harder shape with peaks on the top and then much softer on the bottom and that kind of creates a padding right here that all leads into the large muscle and the interior of the thumb here my fingers will extend out from that let me just quickly indicate in a fingernail a thumbnail i guess padding for my thumb here insert my nail and just ride the the shape above it just up over it a little bit [Music] my knuckle and you can see i'm i'm lightly defining my bone just in here and this is the padding just underneath it and i'm probably over accentuating it a little bit just for the example and it's looking a little bit overdone but i really want to make sure to get those details into this this is a large shape so i'm going to go ahead and put a pretty large shadow just underneath the shape here and then i've got basically folded skin detail that wraps essentially just like this and so i can just follow that around just give it enough to give it a little bit of believability all i'm doing is creating a shape giving a little bit of a curve out like this just to give it a little bit of character and another shape here and i can connect them i'm interconnecting simple shapes to create the look of folds but i don't want my simple shapes to be just simple curves so i like to be able to i like to go ahead and just give them a bit of a this would be a line of beauty and i like to use that quite a bit and it can even be pretty hard edged at times but just doing that and making sure to vary it up very up my sizing a little bit my spacing and the shape itself gives it a lot of character and that's really how i do all of my folds you'll find that when you do this enough it actually gets very automatic [Music] some tendons for my wrist and there's a thumb [Music] for this drawing i've got the back of the hand defined in and i'm going to use it to detail some of the back of the hand and this is something that took me quite a while to get kind of a balance and figure out how to make it work for me consistently without looking too overwrought and like too much of a mess and i can still get a little bit carried away with this at times but go ahead and get this defined in just a little bit cleaner find in my fingers and knuckles [Music] base of my hand there's a little bit of folding in here [Music] major bone at the back of the wrist this is a landmark i really like to use and so i'm going to light it by drawing basically from here so the first thing that i need to define is where my tenons go so i've got a tenon here a tendon here one here one here and then some detail for the wrist and because i'm lighting from here i'm gonna darken this in cast a shadow over my thumb i think i'll just shadow the whole thumb there i can draw a bit of a shadow along this tendon along this one underneath my knuckle along this tendon and along this tendon and you can see that when i do that it looks very mechanical and a little odd and so what i like to do from there is i want this side to be darker so i'm going to fill this in quite a bit more so you'll only see just a little bit of that tendon i'll fill this in [Music] and that gives the overall hand a bit more of a lighting scheme and then the next thing that i can do is i can define where i want some veins and i don't need to really get too carried away with the way that i'm putting my veins in i'll just slash one across here maybe put another one up here and just kind of define some shapes and for veins and then i can use my eraser and just erase them out just like this this is a very simple way to do it you make sure that you have everything below established well and then i'll draw some definition for the vein here a little bit here i'll open it up here and i'm basically negative space drawing in order to get my veins in so i'm really not drawing the vein so much as i'm drawing the shadow where the veins are casting a shadow below and so that gives me quite a bit of vein detail without going really overboard and over detailing my drawing too much and that is how i get my veins established on the back of the hand another place where you'll find veins on your hands and i think is a detail that can really be pretty effective i've got my knuckle drawn in here and if i draw another bit of a shadow dipping underneath it just like that that defines it being just resting under that knuckle i really like how that can look and so now for the last part of this lesson i really want to discuss what i think is the most effective way to learn how to draw hands and that is to use simple shapes and i've got my palm here created a bit of a shape for my thumb here extend my finger up a little bit just to give it a little bit more tension and just drawing simple sketches of of hands like this and drawing lots and lots of them is the best way that i know to get better and more comfortable at drawing hands the problem with hands is that they really do take on such a different form depending on the angle that you see them at and the shape that they're in whether they're clenched or whether they're open or pointing or they're just so many gestures and people recognize hands very easily and so that can be a real problem when you're learning how to draw them if it's off even slightly it's very very obvious and so you really want to just do sketches like this and do hundreds of them and it really is the only way to get comfortable drawing hands quickly and effectively so i'm going to draw a hand with fingers extended and when your fingers are extended it's really the one time when having your fingers pointing outward from the palm and splaying works so it's good to be aware that if the fingers are straight out then it works to have them splayed but if they're curled at all they curl back in toward the palm [Music] so i recommend that you find artists that you like that draw hands very very well and just do these kinds of sketches as studies also draw from your own hand and you can draw from from photographs and anything you can find for comics i do recommend looking at other artists mike mignola is a great artist to look out for hands i think carlos pacheco does some great hands so i've got this is the inside of my hand i've got a ball for my thumb and then i'm just gonna define in my thumb just like this index finger here i want to make sure to curve them around and inward so here's another finger here another one here another one here and they're all curving in toward my palm [Music] i'm gonna draw a hand this is a common pose so i've got my wrist coming away from us here pointing out toward the hand and then i want to lower the hand so you get some tension in the hand and it's not just flat with the wrist draw the back of my hand here shape for my thumb to find in a finger another finger and my fingers round around and downward and so i could even actually see my pinky all the way down like this and i have a choice with my thumb i can draw my thumb like this along the hand i can extend it outward from the hand like this i'm going to draw a fist my wrist is going to come out of it like this my thumb is going to be here and i really want to make sure you get a good round and a nice peak with the middle knuckle being the highest and then coming in toward the bottom here's my index finger my middle finger with that knuckle defined [Music] ring finger and then pinky that's got the lowest knuckle and it's the finger that you can really see bending up into the palm [Music] drawing a hand from the side again just simple sketch study [Music] extend the palm downward just a little bit come out for the thumb on the top of the thumb it has basically a spade shape like this your knuckle your back knuckle and there's your fingernail and so i've given it that kind of a shape because i want it flat in this hand i'm going to have the fingers coming almost completely toward us and so i want a nice flattened shape and i'm drawing you can see my knuckle and then the front of the finger so it's got basically this kind of a shape as it comes around my next finger my my other fingers start to start to curl downward tape in for my thumb pad and so i've got a tube coming out here here here and here and it's rounding around generally speaking in a relaxed hand the two fingers toward the heel of the hand curve inward a little bit and downward and the one final thing that i want to note is if you have a character holding a hilt for a sword or a spear or anything that has some some size to it your your fist won't just wrap into a completely closed fist and it's something that i see happen quite a bit and it ends up looking like there's nothing inside that hand at all and so what you really want to do here's the top of my hand rounded i've got my these knuckles here my first knuckles rounded here and so i'm going to draw one finger here my next one here i could even lift the last one a little shorter and then my thumb is gonna wrap underneath here and so you can see it's actually wrapped around that hilt and it looks like it's got got something in that hand rather than that hand just completely clenched and not looking like it's got anything inside it at all so something to be aware of thank you so much for watching be sure to come by and spend some time with us on our monday night draw live stream monday nights at eight o'clock eastern and a huge thank you to yuri montero he's the new editor for my videos and you can really see the difference in quality i'm so thrilled to have him aboard be sure to check out his instagram i've got the link in the description below and give him a follow

Channel: David Finch

Views: 441,287

Rating: 4.9823895 out of 5

Keywords: drawing tutorial, how to draw, comic art, inking

Id: YcM5PHft0EQ

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020