60 second hands · How to draw hands - timed practice
The subject people name when they say they cannot draw. It is not complexity - it is that you know too much about hands.
What this drill trains
Observation against knowledge. Hands are the subject people name when they say they cannot draw, and the reason is not that hands are complicated - it is that you know too much about them. You know a hand has five fingers of certain lengths, so you draw those, and the result is a diagram of a hand rather than the one in front of you.
The structural correction is that a hand is a box with a fan of cylinders on it, and the knuckles sit on an arc rather than a line. Both are stated on every reference here, because they are the two facts that stop fingers being sausages.
The tool that does the real work is negative space. When your drawing of a finger disagrees with the hand in front of you, drawing the gap beside it instead almost always fixes the finger - your brain has opinions about fingers and none whatsoever about gaps.
How to do it
- Block the palm in as a slightly tapered box - wider at the knuckles, narrower at the wrist, and taller than it is wide.
- Draw the four fingers as one mitten before you separate them. Four shapes drawn one at a time never add up to a hand.
- Put in the knuckle arc and the fingertip arc. The middle knuckle is highest and the fingertip arc is deeper - two curves, and every finger only has to fit between them.
- Divide the mitten and mark two joints per finger. The segments get shorter toward the tip, roughly a half then a third then a quarter.
- Put the thumb on last, from halfway down the side of the palm, and give it two segments rather than three.
- Check the gaps. Every gap between two fingers should be a different shape - if yours are all alike you drew what you know.
Why the references are drawings, not photographs
A photograph of a hand shows you skin, and skin is not the problem. The knuckle arc is invisible on a photograph and it is the thing that has to be drawn, so a reference that shows it directly is teaching and a reference that hides it is a test.
These are drawn, so the arc is a stroke on the page and the joints are marked. Nothing is licensed, nothing is attributed, and nothing can be withdrawn later.
You also have a free reference attached to your other arm, and it is better than any of these. Use your own hand whenever you can and use these for the poses you cannot hold while drawing.
What we measure, and what the number means
Proportion, against the reference: finger lengths relative to the palm, and the spacing between the knuckles. Those two are where hands actually fail, and both are arithmetic rather than judgement.
Whether the knuckles fall on an arc or a line is checked separately, because it is the single most diagnostic thing about a drawn hand. A hand with slightly wrong finger lengths and a correct knuckle arc reads; the reverse does not.
Fingernails, skin texture and shading are not measured at all. They are the things people add when the structure is not working, and rewarding them would be actively unhelpful.
Where it usually goes wrong
Fingers as smooth tubes. Every finger has three segments and a visible width change at each joint, and without those it is a sausage.
Fingers too short. The middle finger is roughly as long as the palm, and almost nobody believes that until they measure their own.
The thumb attached up beside the index finger. It comes off the side of the palm well below, at about forty-five degrees, and getting this wrong is the most recognisable hand error there is.
Adding fingernails to rescue a hand that is not working. Nails make a bad hand worse, every time.
The lessons this drill helps with
The hand lesson directly, and everything else where knowing what the subject is gets in the way of seeing it.
How to draw a hand · How to draw a face · How to draw an eye · How to draw lips · How to draw a nose · How to draw a rose
Questions about drawing hands
- Why are hands so hard to draw?
- Because you know what a hand is, and that knowledge overwrites what is actually in front of you. It is a familiarity problem rather than a complexity one, which is why negative space fixes it.
- Why do my fingers look like sausages?
- You drew them as smooth tubes. Mark two joints on each finger before drawing any contour and widen it slightly at each one.
- How long should the fingers be?
- The middle finger is about as long as the palm. Look at your own hand right now - it is longer than you were going to draw it.
- Should I use my own hand as a reference?
- Always, when the pose allows it. Your non-drawing hand is a better reference than anything on this page; these exist for the poses you cannot hold while drawing.
- How long until hands stop being terrible?
- Two minutes a day for a week produces a change most people can see. The improvement curve on hands is unusually steep, which is the opposite of their reputation.
- Do I need to learn hand anatomy?
- No. The box, the fan of cylinders and the knuckle arc cover almost everything. Tendon and bone detail helps a hand that already works and does nothing for one that does not.
Session lengths
- 60 second hands A warm-up, not a session. Its job is to get the first bad line of the day out of the way somewhere it does not matter - do it immediately before a lesson.
- 3 minute hands The real session, and the default. Long enough that the correction starts happening inside the session instead of between them.