Easily the most asked question I get is “how do you draw caricatures?”. However a close runner up is “how do you draw hands?”.  I’m not exactly the king of drawing hands, but I have made a special study of them as they are very important when doing comic book type work… hands and their gestures are a big part of “acting” and therefore of storytelling.

Next to faces, hands are probably the most expressive and intricate part of the human form. In fact, humans probably spend more time looking at their hands than they do looking at anything else over their entire lives. Being that we are all so familiar with the way hands look, a poorly drawn hand sticks out like a sore thumb (sorry about the pun). Oddly enough, hands are something that most artists struggle to draw well. So, with that in mind I thought I’d do a tutorial on my approach to drawing hands.

I’m a cartoonist at heart, so the hands I draw are not realistic hands by most definitions. However my style of cartooning lends itself more to realistic representation than, say, a certain four fingered gloved mouse or other much more cartoony characters do. Therefore a lot of the information in this tutorial will apply to drawing hands realistically as well as in more cartoon form. I’ll attempt to explain the basic anatomy of a hand, things to keep in mind at all times when drawing them and common mistakes and issues that plague many artists when drawing hands.

Breaking Down Hand Structure

As with drawing anything, it all starts with an understanding of the basic form and structure of your subject matter. Hands are certainly no different. In fact, many of the most common problems with drawing hands stems from incorrect notions of the form of the hand. I’m not a big stickler for memorizing the names of muscles and bones because it seems to zone people out when you start tossing around “Carpal this” and “Metatarsal that”… however labels are something that some people need to be able to apply, so some general surface anatomy with layman’s terms seems to be the best approach. Here is a breakdown of a hand with the important surface elements labeled:

Not really much to it, is there? Everybody knows what knuckles and fingernails are. Where an artist gets tripped up is not understanding how they relate to one another, and how they move in relationship to one another when the hand starts doing it’s thing. Things like how the knuckles line up, where the pad creases fall, how the fingers bend and interact… these are all important elements to drawing convincing hand gestures. (more…)