Drawing Hands from Life in Short Sittings
A practical way to draw hands from life in short sittings, using simple masses before fingers become the whole problem.
Hands fail in drawings because they are asked to be a portrait of five complicated fingers before they are allowed to be a shape. The palm has a mass. The fingers have a direction. The thumb lives a little apart from the rest. If those three facts are wrong, no amount of fingernail detail will repair the drawing. Short sittings favour this order, because you do not have time to hide in the creases.
A box for the palm, a wedge for the fingers
Look at your non-drawing hand under an ordinary lamp. Draw the palm as a block with thickness, not as a flat mitten. The wrist enters that block. The four fingers leave it as one wedge, and only then divide. The thumb comes off the side, lower than beginners expect, and it has its own knuckle.
Spend the first minute on that mitten-and-thumb. If the silhouette is wrong, stop and redraw. Adding nails to a hand that is too long only makes a longer error. A Ten-Minute Daily Sketch Routine You Can Actually Keep is a good container for this. One sitting, one hand, no requirement that it be lovely.
Fingers as simple forms
Each finger is a short chain of cylinders, slightly tapered, with knuckles that sit on an arc rather than on a straight ruler. The middle finger is usually the longest. The others step back. You can check that arc with one glance and save yourself four individual arguments.
Spaces between fingers are part of the drawing. They are narrow, and they widen a little towards the tips when the hand is relaxed. If you draw the gaps as dark equal slots, the hand looks like a glove on a mannequin. Using Negative Space to Make Stronger Drawings and Designs earns its keep here. Draw the gap once, honestly, rather than outlining every finger with the same pressure.
Short poses, then a longer one
Give yourself two minutes for a gesture of the whole hand, five for a hand holding a mug, and only then a longer study if you still want one. The short poses teach you to see the action: grasping, pointing, resting. The long pose tempts you to polish a thumb and lose the grasp.
Change the angle. A hand seen from the back, a hand seen edge-on, and a hand coming towards you are three different shapes. The foreshortened one will look too small if you draw what you know instead of what you see. Believe the shortened finger. Blank Page Fear: Gentle Ways to Start a Sketchbook Page is less of a problem when the pose is allowed to be brief and slightly wrong.
What to write, and what to ignore
Note the time and the mistake: thumb too high, palm too narrow. Ignore the desire to hide the hand behind a sleeve in every picture you make afterwards. Hands are readable at a small size if the mass is right. They become scrambled when every crease is copied and the mass is not.
Use your own hand as the model you always have. It will not hold still forever, which is an advantage. When it moves, you are forced to keep the big shape and let the details go. That is the skill the longer studio pose, with someone else sitting, will later reward.
Frequently asked questions
Which hand should I draw? The one that is not holding the pencil, most of the time. Drawing your drawing hand in a mirror is useful and slower. Alternate, so you do not only learn one silhouette.
Do I need anatomy charts? A simple sense of the palm and the knuckles is enough to begin. Charts help later, when a form is confusing. They are a poor substitute for the hand on the table in front of you.
Why do my fingers look like bananas? The outline is probably a single curve with no knuckles, and the finger is the same width all the way along. Break the outline at the joints and let the form taper. Then check the length against the palm before you add a nail.