art notes: hands
General Art Notes: Hands
Let me preface this by saying that it's difficult to write something on hands that hasn't been written somewhere before by someone a lot more skilled than me. Hands are difficult to draw, and that's not just for you: everyone has or had trouble with hands at some point or other.
This is a somewhat poorly done sketch of a hand. And it's your greatest enemy ever. You think of drawing it, and your head hurts.
It shouldn't be such a nightmare, really. I mean, it's only a set of four fingers on top of a somewhat square shape, and a thumb at one side.
Why the hell are hands so difficult to draw?
Well, personally, I think it's because of how much bending there is. Hands have an awful lot of joints. If you start counting now, you'll notice 14 obvious ones, but there's actually more than that. For art purposes, however, you should consider these:
The thumb only has two joints, but the base of the thumb is quite flexible and moves (and also sticks out), so you should take it into consideration. And there is the wrist as well.
So, artistically speaking, a hand bends on 16 goddamn places. That is an awful lot of bending for something smaller than your head, especially when you consider that a head, which I just posted about, only has "two" joints as far as importance when drawing (the jaw and the neck, please do ignore how awfully incorrect this is, biologically).
Since bones are your friends, there's 27 of them in your hand. However, bones are considerably less helpful when it comes to hands - not only are they an awful lot more complex than skulls in terms of placement and overall shape (a five pronged thing bending an awful lot is definitely more complex than a somewhat round thing that doesn't bend at all), thinking of bones will likely make your head explode more often than if you don't. So don't.
Anyway, now that you know how goddamn bend-y a hand is, and understand the source of your pain and misery a bit better, let's move on.
Like I said, one of the hard parts when thinking of this entry was to think of things that aren't often said about hands. Like heads, people will try to offer formulas for drawing hands, but I think formulas are stupid unless you yourself came up with them, or at least can understand where they come from. And really, there is no decent formula for drawing hands. Hands are entirely too complex to be explained in one simple formula.
Let's look again at that hand from before, edited a bit to look more like an actual hand:
Generally, this is as far as most artists will go when detailing their hands. Knuckles and fingernails, the wrist bone, sometimes a very slight definition of the phalanges at the finger joints. Many don't even include any of those things, because when drawn poorly, they'll just look awkward. If you look at your hands and spread your fingers out, however, you'll likely notice there's a lot more detail than just that.
Your hands are probably the first part of your body you'll ever get wrinkles on. Hell, babies have wrinkles on their fingers. Those wrinkles, however, often don't look very good drawn - they're very subtle on real hands, so they're usually best left out unless you actually want to give off a feeling of wrinkled skin (you may have the impression that the above hand is an elderly person's).
The little "lines" along the back of the hand are tendons. Overweight people usually can't see theirs (I know I couldn't before I lost weight), but they're there. When a hand is relaxed, however, you shouldn't see them. Doing certain movements that bend and strain your fingers makes them pop right out, though. These should also be left alone as well, unless you want either to make the hands look aged (general protip: the more lines you add to a person's skin, the older they'll look), or unhealthily thin, OR the position/movement allows for tendon definition, but keep it sparse.
Now that we're total back-of-the-hand experts, let's look at the palm.
This is the same lame sketch, shamelessly horizontally flipped and with a bit of flesh added just below the pinky. Unlike the back of the hand, palms don't look at all natural if you don't at least define some of the volume areas. Compared to the back of the hand, palms are much fleshier. They also have folds and wrinkles - a ridiculous amount of them. But you only ever need to worry about the three main "bumpy" areas - the back of the knuckles, the "thumb mound" and the "pinky mound". I also defined yet another tendon, at the wrist, which is very defined in some people and barely noticeable in others. It can usually be defined without making the hand look weird, so if you want to add a touch of realism (or if your character is very very thin) you can add it.
For reference, where the finger and wrist joints are. Note that pretty much the entirety of the "thumb mound" can move around a bit. It helps support thumb movement, which is a great thing because if it was stuck in place you'd probably not be able to hold anything, and that'd suck.
Anyway, now that you're a super expert on the number five a hand that's not doing anything particularly wild, let's change that angle a bit, and look at the hand sideways.
Like I said before, the palm has the most volume. The "thumb mound" has the most out of it all; it'll stick out very noticeably no matter which side you look at your hand from. The other two have a bit of volume. Note that the knuckles are bones, so although that area has less volume than around the thumb, it's much harder and doesn't have much flesh, so it won't deform as much as the other two can. There's bone at the very bottom of the thumb part (which is why that's where it sticks out the most), and the part under the pinky is pretty much just flesh.
Okay, now you know all about the front, the back, and the side of your hand. Great! But... the main problem is when the hand starts to bend.
...Okay, honestly. I could write an entire book on hand positions, because something that bends in 16 places at a minimum angle variation of 90 degrees and can be looked at from any angle ever can have so many positions I'd be lucky if I could cover 1% of them in a lifetime.
There's a bunch of guides and references around for hands. I won't get into a lot of detail here. Plus, you have a reference handy - you can draw with one hand and pose with the other.
So instead, I'll talk about bending in general.
Just for clarity's sake, here's a fist viewed from the back:
The knuckles obviously stick out when the fingers bend. The more strain, the more they'll pop out. Knuckle shapes vary. There's people with all knuckles at almost the same height, some with just the middle one sticking out and the others almost unnoticeable, et cetera. Also, the thumb bends differently when you roll your hand up like that - since it generally goes around the other fingers, the knuckle is pushed forward a bit, so it is never at the same level as the other knuckles.
Here, have an awful lot of doodles about fingers. I'll summarize what they're trying to tell you.
Your fingers are not sausages, rubber balloons or jello. Just like your head, they're supported by bones. Three of them for each finger (two for the thumb). These bones are your friends, and they do not appreciate it when you attempt to break them or otherwise make them pliable like a chicken bone left in a glass of soda. Fingers bend at three spots (two for the thumb), not fifty billion spots, no spots, one spot or two spots. They bend three times. Three. No more and no less than three. Learn and love your joints and they'll love you right back.
A common mistake is for people to forget the topmost joint for some unholy reason, and make fingers bend in an "L" shape, or some other massively unnatural way. Or they forget that these joints interact with each other because there is something pulling at them. Likewise, each finger interacts with each other. I dare you to, without any training, effortlessly bend only the tip of your finger without bending any other joints on that finger, or bend only the pinky without at least bringing one (or two) other fingers down a bit with it. It doesn't happen, at least not comfortably.
Also, the picture tries to tell you that fingers are not perfectly straight. Each of the three "sections" of a finger has a shape. The tips may or may not curve up a little bit. Again, joints come into play. This is why, when you look straight at your own finger, pointing to yourself, you don't see a perfectly round tip like you would if you pointed at yourself using a cylindrical object. If your fingertips point up a bit, and they likely do, you'll see a misshapen circle, stretched vertically. If your nails are at least a tiny bit long, you'll probably see a bit of a fingernail as well. And at a perfect angle, nothing else of that finger, just the knuckles and the other fingers.
When you bend your finger forward, the flesh and natural wrinkles will make little "folds" at each joint. If you don't draw those, the finger will look very unnatural.
And when you bend your finger backwards, for the love of god don't break those poor joints. There's a limit to how much they'll bend backwards naturally (i.e. without being pressed by something), and a not-that-higher limit to how much they'll bend backwards with pressure (with no training as a finger contortionist, of course). Also remember joints interact, and if you put pressure on the tip of the finger, all joints will be forced backwards a bit. (Note: The "middle" joint, the one after the knuckles, takes the least well to bending backwards.)
And now, because I know everyone, their mother, their mother's mother, their mother's mother's little dog, and their mother's mother's little dog's fleas all weep tears of blood whenever they have to draw this, I'll explain how to draw hands laced together (i.e. when praying). Because really, everyone I know has a problem with this, and it looks so simple when you stare at your hands. And then you draw it and "simple" flies out the window.
Remember our friend the lame sketch from the start of the post? This fellow:
Well, I'll give him a friend, this other fellow:
Which is actually just the first fellow with a bit of rotation.
And now I'll put them together:
Now we're talking. Now, let's bend those fingers... oh shit, that looks like an awful lot of work. Okay, let's just mark the middle joint for now.
And the other hand too.
Okay awesome. That's where they'll bend. Now we don't need the tips of the fingers anymore because they'll change angles and we have to redraw them anyway, so let's get rid of them.
Done. Now, notice how there's just enough space between each finger on the "front" hand to fit in the rest of the fingers from the "back" hand! Awesome! Let's draw them in, keeping in mind that the first section of the finger, between the knuckle and the middle joint, is bending forward and thus won't appear (which is why we only marked the middle joint, ja?). ...And let's halfass the thumb while at it, because it's stupid and doesn't have a middle joint grr grr.
Okay! ...Uh, kind of maybe. It'd be sort of okay if the fingers were bending in a perfectly straight way with just the tips of the fingers yeah okay nevermind this sucks. See that little note at the top right? It says "angle!"
And it says that because your fingers bend at an angle. I included a lame representation of the fingers lacing sideways to illustrate. The first section of the finger bends forward, and the other two sections go over the other hand's knuckle and "hug" it. At an angle.
Remember when I said there's no real formula for drawing hands? Well, there isn't. But let's try to fix this beast up a bit.
To fix this, I laced my own hands together and looked at them. Then I drew a bit. Laced. Looked. Drew. This is the only true formula for drawing hands - looking. You can make approximations if you're very familiar with hands and don't want to reference, but if they look imperfect with refs, imagine what the chances are of them looking hilarious without.
Anyway - I fixed the position of the thumbs. One thumb is roughly at the height of the other hand's index finger's knuckle, and the other is over the other hand's thumb's knuckle.
I also dragged the tips of the fingers down a bit, since the topmost joint is supposed to be at around the height of the knuckle. And there's some of the middle section showing as well, slightly shorter than it should be, due to the angle.
I marked the middle and top joints of the fingers in the hand in the back here, and the knuckles (and base of the thumb) in the hand in front. Because knowing where the joints are is probably the most important part of drawing hands.
Misc. Notes:
I didn't know where to include these, so they go here.
- Hands with lots of detail look more masculine and aged.
- Children's hands are fleshier and have stubbier fingers.
- Squared nails look masculine. Oval nails look feminine.
- The more definition to bones and tendons, the thinner a hand looks.
- The palm is usually wider than the top four fingers pressed together.
- There's a little bit of flesh between the thumb and index that's particularly prone to folding. Including those folds makes your hands look more natural.
- I already said this. But the best thing about drawing hands is that you have them (unless you don't and draw with your feet/mouth/I don't even want to know, in which case please ignore me). You have reference handy (pun not intended). If you need to draw a guy holding a bottle, hold a bottle! It works wonders.
God that was extremely long and took me an hour and a half to write.
Again, not very useful if you don't already draw. And um, people keep complimenting the way I draw hands, so this is actually hard for me to write since for me it's... pretty intuitive. But hopefully this is better than nothing.
Let me preface this by saying that it's difficult to write something on hands that hasn't been written somewhere before by someone a lot more skilled than me. Hands are difficult to draw, and that's not just for you: everyone has or had trouble with hands at some point or other.
This is a somewhat poorly done sketch of a hand. And it's your greatest enemy ever. You think of drawing it, and your head hurts.
It shouldn't be such a nightmare, really. I mean, it's only a set of four fingers on top of a somewhat square shape, and a thumb at one side.
Why the hell are hands so difficult to draw?
Well, personally, I think it's because of how much bending there is. Hands have an awful lot of joints. If you start counting now, you'll notice 14 obvious ones, but there's actually more than that. For art purposes, however, you should consider these:
The thumb only has two joints, but the base of the thumb is quite flexible and moves (and also sticks out), so you should take it into consideration. And there is the wrist as well.
So, artistically speaking, a hand bends on 16 goddamn places. That is an awful lot of bending for something smaller than your head, especially when you consider that a head, which I just posted about, only has "two" joints as far as importance when drawing (the jaw and the neck, please do ignore how awfully incorrect this is, biologically).
Since bones are your friends, there's 27 of them in your hand. However, bones are considerably less helpful when it comes to hands - not only are they an awful lot more complex than skulls in terms of placement and overall shape (a five pronged thing bending an awful lot is definitely more complex than a somewhat round thing that doesn't bend at all), thinking of bones will likely make your head explode more often than if you don't. So don't.
Anyway, now that you know how goddamn bend-y a hand is, and understand the source of your pain and misery a bit better, let's move on.
Like I said, one of the hard parts when thinking of this entry was to think of things that aren't often said about hands. Like heads, people will try to offer formulas for drawing hands, but I think formulas are stupid unless you yourself came up with them, or at least can understand where they come from. And really, there is no decent formula for drawing hands. Hands are entirely too complex to be explained in one simple formula.
Let's look again at that hand from before, edited a bit to look more like an actual hand:
Generally, this is as far as most artists will go when detailing their hands. Knuckles and fingernails, the wrist bone, sometimes a very slight definition of the phalanges at the finger joints. Many don't even include any of those things, because when drawn poorly, they'll just look awkward. If you look at your hands and spread your fingers out, however, you'll likely notice there's a lot more detail than just that.
Your hands are probably the first part of your body you'll ever get wrinkles on. Hell, babies have wrinkles on their fingers. Those wrinkles, however, often don't look very good drawn - they're very subtle on real hands, so they're usually best left out unless you actually want to give off a feeling of wrinkled skin (you may have the impression that the above hand is an elderly person's).
The little "lines" along the back of the hand are tendons. Overweight people usually can't see theirs (I know I couldn't before I lost weight), but they're there. When a hand is relaxed, however, you shouldn't see them. Doing certain movements that bend and strain your fingers makes them pop right out, though. These should also be left alone as well, unless you want either to make the hands look aged (general protip: the more lines you add to a person's skin, the older they'll look), or unhealthily thin, OR the position/movement allows for tendon definition, but keep it sparse.
Now that we're total back-of-the-hand experts, let's look at the palm.
This is the same lame sketch, shamelessly horizontally flipped and with a bit of flesh added just below the pinky. Unlike the back of the hand, palms don't look at all natural if you don't at least define some of the volume areas. Compared to the back of the hand, palms are much fleshier. They also have folds and wrinkles - a ridiculous amount of them. But you only ever need to worry about the three main "bumpy" areas - the back of the knuckles, the "thumb mound" and the "pinky mound". I also defined yet another tendon, at the wrist, which is very defined in some people and barely noticeable in others. It can usually be defined without making the hand look weird, so if you want to add a touch of realism (or if your character is very very thin) you can add it.
For reference, where the finger and wrist joints are. Note that pretty much the entirety of the "thumb mound" can move around a bit. It helps support thumb movement, which is a great thing because if it was stuck in place you'd probably not be able to hold anything, and that'd suck.
Anyway, now that you're a super expert on the number five a hand that's not doing anything particularly wild, let's change that angle a bit, and look at the hand sideways.
Like I said before, the palm has the most volume. The "thumb mound" has the most out of it all; it'll stick out very noticeably no matter which side you look at your hand from. The other two have a bit of volume. Note that the knuckles are bones, so although that area has less volume than around the thumb, it's much harder and doesn't have much flesh, so it won't deform as much as the other two can. There's bone at the very bottom of the thumb part (which is why that's where it sticks out the most), and the part under the pinky is pretty much just flesh.
Okay, now you know all about the front, the back, and the side of your hand. Great! But... the main problem is when the hand starts to bend.
...Okay, honestly. I could write an entire book on hand positions, because something that bends in 16 places at a minimum angle variation of 90 degrees and can be looked at from any angle ever can have so many positions I'd be lucky if I could cover 1% of them in a lifetime.
There's a bunch of guides and references around for hands. I won't get into a lot of detail here. Plus, you have a reference handy - you can draw with one hand and pose with the other.
So instead, I'll talk about bending in general.
Just for clarity's sake, here's a fist viewed from the back:
The knuckles obviously stick out when the fingers bend. The more strain, the more they'll pop out. Knuckle shapes vary. There's people with all knuckles at almost the same height, some with just the middle one sticking out and the others almost unnoticeable, et cetera. Also, the thumb bends differently when you roll your hand up like that - since it generally goes around the other fingers, the knuckle is pushed forward a bit, so it is never at the same level as the other knuckles.
Here, have an awful lot of doodles about fingers. I'll summarize what they're trying to tell you.
Your fingers are not sausages, rubber balloons or jello. Just like your head, they're supported by bones. Three of them for each finger (two for the thumb). These bones are your friends, and they do not appreciate it when you attempt to break them or otherwise make them pliable like a chicken bone left in a glass of soda. Fingers bend at three spots (two for the thumb), not fifty billion spots, no spots, one spot or two spots. They bend three times. Three. No more and no less than three. Learn and love your joints and they'll love you right back.
A common mistake is for people to forget the topmost joint for some unholy reason, and make fingers bend in an "L" shape, or some other massively unnatural way. Or they forget that these joints interact with each other because there is something pulling at them. Likewise, each finger interacts with each other. I dare you to, without any training, effortlessly bend only the tip of your finger without bending any other joints on that finger, or bend only the pinky without at least bringing one (or two) other fingers down a bit with it. It doesn't happen, at least not comfortably.
Also, the picture tries to tell you that fingers are not perfectly straight. Each of the three "sections" of a finger has a shape. The tips may or may not curve up a little bit. Again, joints come into play. This is why, when you look straight at your own finger, pointing to yourself, you don't see a perfectly round tip like you would if you pointed at yourself using a cylindrical object. If your fingertips point up a bit, and they likely do, you'll see a misshapen circle, stretched vertically. If your nails are at least a tiny bit long, you'll probably see a bit of a fingernail as well. And at a perfect angle, nothing else of that finger, just the knuckles and the other fingers.
When you bend your finger forward, the flesh and natural wrinkles will make little "folds" at each joint. If you don't draw those, the finger will look very unnatural.
And when you bend your finger backwards, for the love of god don't break those poor joints. There's a limit to how much they'll bend backwards naturally (i.e. without being pressed by something), and a not-that-higher limit to how much they'll bend backwards with pressure (with no training as a finger contortionist, of course). Also remember joints interact, and if you put pressure on the tip of the finger, all joints will be forced backwards a bit. (Note: The "middle" joint, the one after the knuckles, takes the least well to bending backwards.)
And now, because I know everyone, their mother, their mother's mother, their mother's mother's little dog, and their mother's mother's little dog's fleas all weep tears of blood whenever they have to draw this, I'll explain how to draw hands laced together (i.e. when praying). Because really, everyone I know has a problem with this, and it looks so simple when you stare at your hands. And then you draw it and "simple" flies out the window.
Remember our friend the lame sketch from the start of the post? This fellow:
Well, I'll give him a friend, this other fellow:
Which is actually just the first fellow with a bit of rotation.
And now I'll put them together:
Now we're talking. Now, let's bend those fingers... oh shit, that looks like an awful lot of work. Okay, let's just mark the middle joint for now.
And the other hand too.
Okay awesome. That's where they'll bend. Now we don't need the tips of the fingers anymore because they'll change angles and we have to redraw them anyway, so let's get rid of them.
Done. Now, notice how there's just enough space between each finger on the "front" hand to fit in the rest of the fingers from the "back" hand! Awesome! Let's draw them in, keeping in mind that the first section of the finger, between the knuckle and the middle joint, is bending forward and thus won't appear (which is why we only marked the middle joint, ja?). ...And let's halfass the thumb while at it, because it's stupid and doesn't have a middle joint grr grr.
Okay! ...Uh, kind of maybe. It'd be sort of okay if the fingers were bending in a perfectly straight way with just the tips of the fingers yeah okay nevermind this sucks. See that little note at the top right? It says "angle!"
And it says that because your fingers bend at an angle. I included a lame representation of the fingers lacing sideways to illustrate. The first section of the finger bends forward, and the other two sections go over the other hand's knuckle and "hug" it. At an angle.
Remember when I said there's no real formula for drawing hands? Well, there isn't. But let's try to fix this beast up a bit.
To fix this, I laced my own hands together and looked at them. Then I drew a bit. Laced. Looked. Drew. This is the only true formula for drawing hands - looking. You can make approximations if you're very familiar with hands and don't want to reference, but if they look imperfect with refs, imagine what the chances are of them looking hilarious without.
Anyway - I fixed the position of the thumbs. One thumb is roughly at the height of the other hand's index finger's knuckle, and the other is over the other hand's thumb's knuckle.
I also dragged the tips of the fingers down a bit, since the topmost joint is supposed to be at around the height of the knuckle. And there's some of the middle section showing as well, slightly shorter than it should be, due to the angle.
I marked the middle and top joints of the fingers in the hand in the back here, and the knuckles (and base of the thumb) in the hand in front. Because knowing where the joints are is probably the most important part of drawing hands.
Misc. Notes:
I didn't know where to include these, so they go here.
- Hands with lots of detail look more masculine and aged.
- Children's hands are fleshier and have stubbier fingers.
- Squared nails look masculine. Oval nails look feminine.
- The more definition to bones and tendons, the thinner a hand looks.
- The palm is usually wider than the top four fingers pressed together.
- There's a little bit of flesh between the thumb and index that's particularly prone to folding. Including those folds makes your hands look more natural.
- I already said this. But the best thing about drawing hands is that you have them (unless you don't and draw with your feet/mouth/I don't even want to know, in which case please ignore me). You have reference handy (pun not intended). If you need to draw a guy holding a bottle, hold a bottle! It works wonders.
God that was extremely long and took me an hour and a half to write.
Again, not very useful if you don't already draw. And um, people keep complimenting the way I draw hands, so this is actually hard for me to write since for me it's... pretty intuitive. But hopefully this is better than nothing.