If you ask any artist familiar with life drawing the following question: What is the most challenging for you when drawing from life? There is a good chance that the answer will have something to do with how to draw hands or feet. Getting the proportions right might be another answer as well as foreshortening. I hope in the future posts to be able to tackle each of these challenges and make them less intimidating.
Here are a few tips to help you draw hands in your life drawing class:
I don’t think I am drawing perfect hands all the time yet, well I am not drawing perfect figures anyways! but at least hands are not a part I think as something more difficult or more special than the rest of the drawing.
I think one of the main difficulty of drawing hands is that the level of details is higher than in most of the rest of the drawing, except maybe the face.
Here are a few guidelines to help you draw hands
The size of the hand is about the size of the face from hairline to chin. The width of the wrist at is at its smallest were it attaches to the end and is about twice its thickness.
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So once good tip to start is to think about the scale of the hands and draw their position on the drawing as very simple shapes that look like gloves.
The base of the hand is a squarish shape.
From there you have a triangle shape that starts at the base of that square where the thumb is attached.
If you draw the inside of the hand you can also represent the two main muscle masses.
Each finger has 3 joints.
The knuckles are not aligned but on a curve. The 5 bones on the hand are called metacarpal, then on the fingers, the bones are called phalanges.
It might help you to draw 4 circular shapes to represent the knuckles, I find it easier to place the fingers if I do that.
The skin on the top side of your hand and fingers is close to the bone, so the lines are more or less straight.
There is more muscle underneath, so the lines are curvy.
What is your biggest challenge when you are drawing realistic hands?
Originally from France, I have been living in North Vancouver, Canada for the past 20 years.
My work has been collected and exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally. I am also part of the Art Rentals and sales program of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Many of my paintings have been published in Art books and magazines (Artist Magazine, Watercolor Artist Magazine, Acrylic Magazine, International Artist Magazine). I wrote 2 art instruction books with North Light/F+W Books.
I have been writing for the last 5 years for my blog: paintingdemos.com, that has a mailing list of about 10 000 subscribers and about 20 000 visitors per month.
I am an active member in the community, as a co-founder of the North Shore Art crawl, a co-founder of a weekly life drawing group, a board member of the North Vancouver Arts Council, and have been invited as a juror for public art, art grants and juried exhibitions. You can read more about my collaborations here.
These are very useful tips. The way you have segmented hands, fingers and bone formations makes he drawing an abstract exercise allowing the artist to focus less on the entire hand.
Thank you.
Eddi
Thanks Eddi 🙂 I am happy you find this post useful.
Mihaela
Very good advice, thank you! I sometimes have trouble rendering fingers, if doing a drawing from life, when giving them depth. One thing that helps me is thinking of fingers as tubes, angled circular shapes. It’s also interesting to draw hands from different, more unusual angles. This way we have no preconceived ideas about what the hand should look like and we can focus better on what we actually see. Paying attention to the different planes and the relationship between them helps to create a more realistic drawing as well.
Again, great information and thank you for sharing it!
Comments (4)
Eddi Reid
These are very useful tips. The way you have segmented hands, fingers and bone formations makes he drawing an abstract exercise allowing the artist to focus less on the entire hand.
Thank you.
Eddi
Sandrine Pelissier
Thanks Eddi 🙂 I am happy you find this post useful.
Mihaela
Very good advice, thank you! I sometimes have trouble rendering fingers, if doing a drawing from life, when giving them depth. One thing that helps me is thinking of fingers as tubes, angled circular shapes. It’s also interesting to draw hands from different, more unusual angles. This way we have no preconceived ideas about what the hand should look like and we can focus better on what we actually see. Paying attention to the different planes and the relationship between them helps to create a more realistic drawing as well.
Again, great information and thank you for sharing it!
Sandrine Pelissier
Thanks Mihaela, good points:) I agree with you , sometimes unusual angles are easier to draw.