Good hands bad hands fuck it if you’re dead? Ghost hands.
We all hate drawing hands. Well, not me, but I’m a freak. Most people hate drawing hands. Hands are, behind eyes, the things we pay attention to most often in other people. They’re the things we know should look a certain way, so even tiny things that are off will look like enormous mistakes.On top of that, our hands look like nothing else in the animal kingdom. Even monkey hands look different.
So here’s a tutorial to help y’all, outside of tracing and drawing hands ad nauseum until you force yourself to love them.
1. General recognizable shapes
If you can make some sort of hand-ish shape that hits the certain buttons that tell the brain “this is a hand,” you typically don’t have to worry about getting anatomy right.What are those shapes?
Thumb, circle, short-tall-short fingers. Watch what happens when I reduce a hand to its basic shapes. I don’t even have to use all four fingers.
We recognize that this is meant to be hand-ish. Why? Because it meets these symbol-requirements.
A basic L-shape (purple), lines that extend out from a base (line green), and digits that follow a basic short-tall-short rhythm (teal). Because of that I can make a bunch of different images that we can see as generally hand-ish.
Knowing these symbols is the same reason why we see handprints in the negative space of these cave paintings.
We recognize the symbols of fingers, thumb, and palm. Though the actual painted part is the brown, darker area, we recognize the shape of a hand in the negative, empty space inside it.
2. Drop a knuckle
Disney animators are EXTREMELY fond of this method and for good reason. You’ll see what I mean with this pic.
Hands irl have three joints: the big knuckle that connects it to the palm (metacarpophalangeal joint) and two smaller knuckles (two interphalangeal joints). It’s very common practice though to reduce that from two interphalangeal joints to just one, as seen in these screencaps. It makes posing simpler and leaves out trying to figure out where that third small joint is supposed to go, and for the most part, no one will be able to tell. And if you’re still mastering hands, you can always use this as a stepping stool until you feel more comfortable adding in the third joint, if you decide to at all.
3. Drop a whole-ass finger
Do you know why a lot of toons have three fingers? Because it’s easier than trying to fit in that fourth finger! That is the actual reason Disney and Co. created Mickey with only three fingers: because animating that fourth finger takes too much time and effort.
And you can use that too, even if you want to use four fingers! Take a look at this old tutorial from disney.
They pretty much plonk the pinky in there and you can do the same whether using three or four fingers! Starting with fewer fingers helps you focus on pose and gesture before worrying about anatomy. Just remember to add in that fourth finger, if that’s your style!
4. Draw a line from the wrist and work out from there
Did you know you can draw an unbroken line from the middle of your wrist to the end of your middle finger?
Use that to build the gesture of the hand.
5. Check out this neat math shit
(Ya knuckles are typically halfway from wrist to fingertip.)
6. Draw mitten
7. Draw circles and lines
8. Hands
9. Go out and be a god among men with your sinful, sinful hands
10. Congrats! You drew hands! Now go draw a hundred more and make everyone think you have a hand fetish.
