The Hand

The hand is one of those amazing features of the human body that has confused and confounded artists since art began. For some reason, we appear to have a tough time judging the proportions of the hand with its little bits and bumps and it requires very concentrated effort for the beginning artist to begin to unravel its mysteries.

In this post I wanted to walk through the process I take in drawing a hand and the foibles I had along the way. To kick things off, we have to create a general shape for the hand. In this first figure, I have started by creating a very basic outline, what Anthony Ryder refers to as the "mitten" in his book The Artist's Complete Guide to Figure Drawing. It's an outline of the hand that connects the tips of the fingers, the sides of the outer hand, outer thumb and wrist. It's meant to provide a general mass to the hand that can then be divided up into smaller pieces.

Once we have the mitten, it's time to begin blocking in the fingers. My approach has centers around establishing the base collection of bones in the wrist first. This allows me to create a starting point for the rest of the hand. Next comes the middle digit. I start with relatively straight lines for the bones and try to breathe a bit of life into them by gradually curving them to avoid a stiff-looking anatomy.

You might notice that the ring finger has been lengthened in the figure below. I missed that error during the layout but thankfully caught it prior to the next step.

I lay out the basic structure and then start filling in the details, as Ryder describes as "drawing on the inside" of the lines you've created in the previous steps. Once this phase begins, it's a simple process of just continuing to observe your model (an anatomy illustration in this case) and paying attention to the details.

Here is a closeup of the drawing to give you an idea of the detail involved. The wrist is 2" across so this is actually around 125% magnification on your monitor.