Hands Are Hard

For beginning artists interested in making pictures of people, drawing hands seem to give the most trouble. Even accomplished artists with dozens of portraits under their belts may avoid doing hands if at all possible. Hands are hard. But like any other skill in art, the difficulty of drawing and painting hands eventually surrenders to study and diligent practice.

Simple shapes in drawing a hand. Source: https://kyunghees1.wordpress.com/

Drawing hands is probably best attacked by breaking the hand into simple shapes. The back of a hand is a trapezoid, the base of the thumb a triangle. The fingers are actually cylinders with three segments each. The thumb has only two segments. Those bare-bones descriptions of the parts of a typical hand don't help much, though, when learning. A good approach for me was to learn the parts and typical proportions of hands then spend a lot of time trying to draw them, either from life, sculptures, or memory, at rest or in motion, and from many different viewpoints. In these days of easy online searching, many photos of hands can be found, of course, but for me examples from various masters make the best models.

Hand study after Michelangelo, digital drawing

Michelangelo famously destroyed many of his drawings, but a few escaped the flames, including some studies of hands for various complete works. This digital copy of one of them was done to replicate the appearance of sanguine, a natural red chalk, on old paper. The drawing is from an online image whose date I did not copy. For me the difficulty is in capturing a hand from such an angle. The profile makes is crucial to get the proportions right. This was done in Sketchbook on a Wacom tablet.

Another copy of a Michelangelo study that helped me learn is this one, done from another unusual angle. Here it appears that the master was studying hands for one of his figures in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. One of the most helpful techniques in accurately drawing and rendering this hand is using three values, again emulating an old technique of dark red and bright white chalks on yellow paper. Light falling on the palm helps give dimensionality to the hand and fingers.

Leonardo daVinci left drawings of hands behind, too, including this one (my copy at right). This particular copy was difficult because of the overlapping fingers. It is a study of fingers playing a flute or similar instrument. Again the use of red, white and black on a tan background emulates the original with somewhat yellowed paper and chalks.




For beginners seeking to understand anatomy and freshen their drawings, the first step is to learn basic anatomy. But once the fundamentals are understood, seems to me that one could do lots worse than copying from the masters.

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Hand Drawing Tutorials
Darlene Nguyen-Drawing Hands
How to Draw Hands
Digital Tutorial (Sketchbook) - Two Approaches to Hands