How to Draw Dynamic Hand Poses - Step by Step

1. Introduction Video: Hello, everyone. Welcome back. My name is Robert Marzullo and I'll be your instructor for this class, How to Draw Dynamic Hand Poses Step-by-Step, brought to you by Skillshare. For our first example, we'll start with a basic open palm pose. That way, we can cover things like where the knuckles align to the overall proportions of the hand, just generally a warming up for the more advanced examples that we'll be doing next. For our next hand pose, we'll tilt it just a little bit. We'll bend the finger in and just solely warming up for the positioning and the changes that you might see in some typical hand poses. Then, for the next example, we'll draw a hand gripping an object. This is obviously a great opportunity to focus on the bend of the knuckles and the way that the hand changes as it reacts to another shape or another form. Then, for our next three examples, we'll work on a stressed or clenched hand pose and then two fists from different angles that should give you a nice variety to study from and practice along with. But make sure to take what you learn here in the class and then do lots of studies. Hands take a while to master, so you want to get in a nice variety of different hand poses and gestures so that you really start to feel comfortable with it. Be sure to share your work in the Project section of this class. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Good luck with the art and I'll talk to you soon. 2. Open Hand Pose: In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to draw hands. I wanted to show you some of the things that you can look for when constructing your hand poses. Like anything else, let's start with a very basic rudimentary pose, about as basic as it gets. I'll just point out, again, some of the things to look for when constructing the hands that I think make it much easier to accomplish. One of the things that's good to do is notice this diamond point that you get off to one side, and this is actually where the middle finger will be. This actually I think is evident in two spots, and I'll show you that in a second. Another thing that you can pay attention to is the way that the bones collapse or compress inward like this. A lot of people will draw a pivot point like this even though it's a little bit more extreme than the way they converge, but you can really start from there, work your way out, and notice that as well. This is going to be an open hand pose, and just with the fingers extended outward or upward. But what you want to make sure to really not do when you do the fingers, is just draw them as straight lines. This is what beginner artists tend to do, something like that. What you want to think about is how the fingers themselves can bend independently from one another even if it's ever just so slightly, it doesn't have to be very extreme. But you want to realize that each one of these take upon their own curvature and their own direction. Once you start to do more and more complex hand poses, you'll see that quite a bit. Let's just have the thumb comes up as a shape here. This is usually a different shape altogether, get to the back of the knuckle there, and then right here. Something like this. The tricky thing with the thumb is it comes out and then bends away a little bit. It's got a very independent feel from the rest of the hand, then the webbing comes across and attaches there. You've got this larger part of the thumb right there, the more dominant side, and then you've got the smaller part over there. Back to this, I really want to show the relationship of the fingers. The tricky thing I think when constructing the fingers is, first off, getting away from that concept that they're all straight, which they never are. You got to break that habit. Then also the relationship, so you've got this diamond point here, but then you have this curvature relationship, it's a low of the knuckles. You got this curvature here, and this curvature here, it starts to pick up a little bit more. Just really get used to looking down at your own hand and really checking your work, especially on basic poses, and then get in the habit of taking photos for the more complex poses and studying that. You've got your own best guide to reference right in front of your natural own hand. Let's start with the middle finger. Let's work up and add these segments. Let's find the peak of the finger here. Now, generally, the middle finger, again, if you were to check your own hand, will be about the same height as the rest of the hand here. That's usually the first guide that I use for proportions and then from there, you usually will notice that your pointer finger here is going to be smaller. Your ring finger here is going to be smaller, and generally, this can vary, but it can be a little bit taller than the pointer finger and then the pinky finger obviously being the smallest of the bunch. What you do is you start to realize these relationships and you look for these, so you got the arcing motion here. Notice too that this set of knuckles, it will actually line up to the tip of the thumb. All these things can give you these guides and the starting points. The other thing is, I see the relationship that you see from the knuckles here becomes evident again back up here. Instead of drawing this as a arc, I like to draw this back as that diamond shape that you see here. To me, that's a little bit more of a better representation than the arcs that you see here. I think that's a little bit different than what you're going to learn in most books or that I've learned in other books that I've studied. But a lot of this stuff, you're going to develop your own process, you're going to develop your own perception on the things that you learn. That's okay, it's very important that you know which things to really adhere to your workflow, and which things you realize are best to let go of because of maybe your own style or your own way of doing things. There's a really neat thing that happens there when you study and you learn this stuff and sometimes you do have to develop your own way of perceiving it and doing it. What I want to also do is make sure not to have the separation in between the fingers all the same. If you notice there I have these two closer together, I've got this one spaced out a little more, this one spaced out even more. That's another thing that I think makes a more interesting hand pose. Now, one of the things that I see that's immediately wrong with what I have here, I need to bring it back out this way to where this end part of the hand is. Now as far as the width of the hand, it could almost be said that the width of the hand is about the same as the ring finger. Not quite as wide as the middle finger, but it depends on the part you're measuring. It's pretty close if you were to bring the middle finger across here to the bone of the thumb right there. It's really up to what you're seeing as far as what you're constructing, or if you're studying from reference, then obviously there's lots of different hand shapes, proportions are going to vary. But let's say right about here for what we're after. This is a bit rougher because we're getting our construction lines in and we're studying the relationships. I'm going to soft-erase this down now, and see if I can draw through this and make a pretty decent hand pose. I'll study my hand and look for inconsistencies in my rough sketch. I think I want to bring this webbing out further this way. I think I want to increase the size of the thumb a little bit, with the knuckle here. Now another thing that I'm going to recommend if you still struggle to get even this far or really at all, another great thing to study is just drawing the skeletal structure. It gives you a lot better representation of what's going on because one of the things that happens is, you have the webbing and the padding and the skin of the hand up here, but you have to be aware that the knuckles end back here. That's something I think that's tricky and a lot of artists may overlook when they're drawing out their work. Now, the other thing about the pads of the fingers is they progressively get smaller, but they really have a pretty segmented difference from each area. What I mean by that is if you were to really study each finger, you'll notice that the pads are not identical as they shape up and converge to the tip of the finger. They're actually quite different from one another in shape and flow or whatever. It's good to pay attention to things like that, because if not, we tend to just go, "I'm going to make a finger and I'm going to make every segment identical." It doesn't look like a finger, it looks like something mechanically constructed or designed. These little bits of variants that you get in there are going to go a long ways to making your anatomy or your drawings look more alive essentially. It's knowing when to jump in there and go, "You know what? Maybe this pad would be just misshapen a little bit, or there'd be a small bump before it connects to the base of the hand here." Little things like that will really liven it up a bit. In the very beginning, you're just worried about getting everything into place, drawing it halfway decent and that's okay, just get that out of the way. But then it's funny how you actually have to reverse think it like you start to draw everything as perfect as you can and then you realize that that's actually hurting the work that you need some imperfections in there. A little bit smaller on that pinky. Again, I'm really paying special attention to my fingers, and quite honestly still some variants like this is pretty accurate to the way my hand is shaped, but then as I get to the pinky it's actually a lot lower than the ring finger there. I'm going to bring that down even further just making these small little changes to try to get that right. I think I've got a little too much angle here. Now, I don't want to necessarily go for an entirely accurate representation here. I'm studying my own hand and I just want you to be aware of that, that's always a good thing to do. Obviously, I've mentioned it a couple of times here. But for a stylized drawings and imaginative drawings, you're going to take what you see here and you're going to embellish it obviously. But I just want to start with the foundational information. That's also why we start with the very basic pose like this. Just get some of this stuff going, warm up with something like this, then take it to the side. Remember, you can also check things from a distance, and you seem to pick out flaws like I'm still not entirely satisfied with the thumb shape here, so I'll keep working on that. I think it needs to be a little bit more of a smooth arc. Again, if I was going for a stylized representation, then I would just throw that out the window and do whatever I thought looks cool. I think that's a lot of times when I come back with myself going back and forth drawing this because I'm so used to doing stylized drawings from the mind. Then when I study something I have to compromise a little bit of that for reality, for realism. Let's use that as our base study, and then now let's work on some more dynamic shots. 3. Open Hand Pose on an Angle: Now we're going to try another hand pose, a little bit more advanced but not much, and we'll slowly work up to the more dynamic poses. This particular one, I want to start at a slight angle, and I want to have the fingers converge up, so I'm going to define this one with overall basic shapes at first. This is the palm of the hand, this is the area the fingers will generally be in, and then we'll attach the thumb. Now another thing is the pad of the thumb is roughly right down the middle at its widest point right there, so it had to be lined up to the middle finger. Again, taking note of any of these little relationships and positionings will help you. We'll attach the thumb with a couple primitive shapes like this. There's our starting point, less than perfect obviously, but it gets us going. Then we'll attach the hand, the wrist, something like that. Now, it'd be really easy for me to just go up here and maybe do something like this, and call that a hand. Pretty boring, pretty basic obviously, and that's not really how a hand would look, so what we have to do is think past that and go, okay. We know that the fingers are all going to take upon their own direction even if ever so slightly. Then we know that the middle finger's the largest. Maybe we put a little bit of separation from the middle finger to the pointer, something like that. Then maybe these other fingers start to curve inward a bit, so you'll see that a lot with the hand, that even in relaxed gestures that it just starts to fold in a little bit. We'll get that pinky on an angle like that. You can see that even as quickly as that, it looks a bit more interesting. It looks a lot more alive than that first sketch, and that's really where drawing by comparison is so important because it makes you realize those things, especially when you set them side-by-side as you go, oh, I can definitely see why one looks realistic and the other one looks poorly drawn. That's something you want to practice doing, is just noticing those little differences like that. Now, to me the fingers don't look long enough by comparison to the thumb, so let's try grabbing it right through the middle here and just bringing this up, something like this. Now, if I wanted to check the work too, I could take the middle finger and actually let me give it a bottom line to show you where I feel it's ending, something right there. Again, we've got this point, right there, and then we've got these relationship curves and then the point again, like that. Let's say that this is the length of our middle finger, and you can see it's roughly the length or the height or whatever, of the base the hand, the palm of the hand, so it's right about there. It's probably even stand to come down a little bit more as we start to detail the pads of the hand. The other thing is that when you're drawing the connection point of the fingers to the hand, that you make sure to draw this line almost that goes across the line that comes down. You'll see a lot of people draw fingers and they'll just have the fingers come down, wrap right up to the next finger, come down wrap right up to the next finger, and it starts to look like a rubber glove or something, it just doesn't look accurate. You want to make sure to bring those down, and then they connect or they bump into the skin there and create a line going the other way or a little bit of that padding in right there. Now the other thing is when the fingers start to change shape or direction, the line is going to change right here, so the separation of the segments of the finger is going to change. From here, these lines may look like they're going straight across or maybe even slightly upward, something like this we'll say. But as this pinky changes direction and comes out towards camera, this line right here is going to go down. It's just little things like that that help to convey foreshortening or depth. It's really a lot of times the very basic components of the drawing that will help to get these things right. Because, I always say, all the rendering in the world isn't going to fix a bad foundational drawing, some of that information has to be right in the rough sketch, the really basic portion of it. Now here with the thumb, it gets a little bit tricky. I would say from this angle, we're not going to see the thumbnail. Again, looking at my hand as referent, I would say that we're not going to. You got to be careful because I think, naturally, you'll want to do something like that, but it can quickly make the thumb look like it's bent in too far, and I'm not saying that it couldn't do that. But from this angle, if you were going to see that thumbnail, the thumb would have to probably be tucked in really far into the hand pose, something like this. Again, that's where drawing by comparison is neat because it'll teach you the rotation of the way that the the opposing thumb can go. Smaller pad over here, something like this. The pads of the finger here, we got to figure out how to define those. Then the wrinkles in the lines that we get here. Again, we're going to get rid of this, I don't think we'd see that. We also want to get rid of this line here because it's making it look different than the shape it'd actually be. We actually want the shape of the thumb from this angle to look more like this. Hopefully you can see that. Again, that's it's own direction, its own angle set to the opposing segment to the hand, so it should be at a very different angle than the rest. I'll try to illustrate it further as we go. But there's also a really great relationship that you need to pay attention to from the pinky to the thumb. A good one to draw is where you hold your pinky and thumb together and draw that because there's a definite relationship in the way those two work together. I'll soft erase this pad, try to correct it and clean it up a bit, and then we'll move on to our next pose. Things that I think about at this stage are where the roundedness of the forms are, when I can dip in the skin a little bit, and add like a little bit of interesting character to it, how these lines connect, I can add a very interesting effect to it. Another thing right here is where when you draw connection points to show even the slightest bit of overlap. What I'd like to do here is really show this coming up and connecting past the wrist right there. Because if I was to draw that just like this, it immediately looks more flat to me, so I just draw that little bit of area that goes in front like that first, making sure not to trace everything, not to overly define every line, and changing line weight as I go here. This one's a bit more difficult for me because I keep wanting to look at my hand and I'm left-handed and this would be me drawing a left hand, so you can imagine my dismay. But move, just persevere through that. But I guess I could be looking at my other hand, which introduces another dynamic to it because you're forced to mirror it in your mind, which is something we all need to get better at. Again, I'm trying to make sure that each one of these fingers look a bit different from one another in proportion. I'm also studying the differences on where the segments to the fingers align, like this. Again, I want to show two lines generally for that separation, it looks a bit more realistic. You actually even get two lines down here, try to get those segments properly in place. I'm fighting the urge, I keep drawing the pinky too large. It is going to appear a little bit larger based on foreshortening because it's coming in front of the other finger, but it's still significantly smaller than the rest of the fingers so I have to make sure to get that in place. Now the other thing I will point out is when you get to this point and you're drawing even these segments and these divides right there, like anything else with the body, just really fight the urge to make them all look identical. It's such a simple thing and I keep reiterating it obviously, but it makes such a world of difference in your illustrations when you just fight that urge to make everything look overly symmetrical, overly even, overly repetitive, so just try to remember that and fight that as you progress through your work. Then as we render, we can really fix a lot of those overly repetitive things as well. I think I got that wrist a little too small. I won't get too far into this because this isn't entirely about rendering the hand as much it is about learning how to construct the poses and what to look for. There's our next pose right there. Now let's go to something a little bit more, as I scale this down, I always seem to see flaws as I scale it down and I really don't like the way that I brought the hand in too far here, so let's try bringing this shape out. I think that looks a bit more realistic. I also don't like the overall shape and size of the pinky, especially this segment of the pinky right here. This first segment needs to be larger by comparison. I always seem to see flaws either when I reverse my work or when I scale it down considerably. We'll go ahead and call that one good. It'll could always be better obviously, but let's go ahead and work on to a more dynamic pose now. 4. Hand Holding an Object: Now we're am going to go ahead and draw a hand reacting with an object. Let's start by defining the wrist, the larger section of the hand, the palm, thumb area. What we want to do is have this doing a bit of a clenched fist on to what could be a weapon of some kind, or a sword handle or something. But the tricky thing about this particular pose is really the way the hand compresses around the object. You want to, again, remember this relationship difference from finger to finger. Just remember that the fingers fan across, that the knuckles can somewhat align, but we want to purposely make sure they don't align too much, it'll start to look too mechanical. Again that they all act a little bit independently from one another. I think that's the trickiest thing to really get right with drawing the hand and remembering because it's so easy to just overly align them through the drawing process. Again, we want to keep in mind that middle finger's obviously larger, more prominent, so we can almost start there. I generally start with the most prominent part in the sketch and use that as my placeholder to work through it. Pinky obviously should be a lot smaller, noticeably smaller on both directions, so from here and here. This is really why the knuckles can't be perfectly aligned because since they are different shapes when they compress, each one of those is going to shift a bit. So you got to make sure that's properly illustrated. Even something like this, so this knuckle will be higher, this will be lower. We're also going to direct the fingers quite a bit by using the finger nails, so I'll show you that here in a second. Let's get the object that it's holding on to or the hand's reacting to, so something like this. Then we have to connect the hand back here to the palm and bring the thumb over here. There's our rough sketch, that gets us started. Now we've got to refine this a bit and figure out how we can improve upon this. I feel like the fingers need to be condensed in more into the palm. So the palm either needs to be drawn larger like this, or we need to move these fingers back, which I think is what we really need to do. I'm going to select these, pull those on tighter, and now we've got our rough sketch into place and I guess I could rough sketch in the fingernails. What I really want to make sure to show you here is that the fingernails are a really great way to quickly show the direction of the fingers. They add an immediate level of depth and direction to the fingers, so you can use those really well for that. Then past this when we start to refine this, we want to make sure to get rid of these straight lines. You can see right here and here, all these lines really, I've got too many straight lines. Again, that's going to make it look too technical. The only place we ever want a straight line would be the object it's holding it. If not, we're not going to have a very organic looking hand. I'll get a little bit of that wrist in there. Now we'll do a soft erase and try to clean this up and refine this a bit more. Scale this up so we have a little bit easier time with it. Again, I just want to bounce around that line a little bit, show some separation there in the shapes. We might even want to get a little bit of the reaction of the skin to the object here. Let's go ahead and ruler in our an object. I would say little differences like this make a big difference or a small adjustment. For instance, with the nail, you can have the nail go right up to the tip of the thumb like that. But if you show this little bump that you get from where it recesses down, it looks a lot more believable. So just tiny little details like that make a world of difference. Likewise, you can get a little bit of the edge of the nail in there that looks more realistic, so doesn't have to be very pronounced. In fact, a lot of times when doing this type of stuff, subtlety makes a world of difference. It shows that you know the information's there, but you're not overly illustrating it like we tend to do in the beginning. We tend to over illustrate every bit of information that we see. But the more you learn to just add subtle hints of it into your work, the more professional tend to look. Like this, you want that knuckle to come up. You don't really want it to be just a rounded shape like that, want it to come up, taper over and back down. Even have one side uneven from the other. All these little things make it look a little more believable because it's not so symmetrical, not so overly even from side to side, has that asymmetry. But even the difference here, so this is a big one, so when the skin hits another area, another part of the skin and it's compressing, you're going to get little folds and things here. It can be tricky to get these right, so you really want to play around with them, but you just don't want straight lines. You might get a bit more of a bend here and it might taper back or angle back the other way, it might get a little shadow there. You really want to play around with that. Then as we get down to here, we want the middle finger to be the most prominent so we'll start there, and we want to see the change in the direction of the knuckle there. So we're going to get some of those in there, something like that. But again, as it comes up to here and these areas of skin get pushed around, you want to figure out ways to make those lines have a little bit of movement to them, a little bit of variation. Because again, if not, it'll look just too overly technical and not very well thought out. Likewise, you might put one finger in front of the other a little bit, something like that, a little bit more. I'm constantly nudging these lines around, I'm trying to make it look a bit more believable but more organic, realistic, whatever you want to call it. Again, about the knuckles, I don't want those too overly aligned. They should all be residing at their own angle from one another, and the pinky should be a bit shorter by comparison. There we go. Wrinkle here. Actually let me space that out. We're starting to get there and hopefully looking a bit correct, correct enough anyways. I get a little bit of the edge of the knuckle there. Again, I'll bring the pad of the hand back. I'll bring a little bit of an edging. I don't like that though. Sorry. Here's something like this. I just want a little bit of a wrinkle or something there almost envisioning that the hand is bending back onto itself a little bit or back onto the wrist a little bit. Something like that. We want some of the wrinkles inside the palm here and over the fingernail. Again, I really love putting the fingernails in there because they help add so much depth so quickly. They're really a great dynamic for drawing the hands. You can direct the fingers really well with them. You can add depth with the line weight really well because you can add a little shading from where the skin appears to lump up before it hits the nail there. It's just a really great thing. The fingernails are definitely worth getting good at just because they add so much for such a short amount of time. Little bits of shadow on there. You can play around with the distance that's in between. Obviously from this angle, if you bring the fingernails right to the edge of the finger, then you're really going to push the perspective that they're going this way. Again, just a lot of dynamic in that one little area. Now the other thing that you can do as well is you can add just a little bit of lines like this, I oftentimes will, to show the plane change. They can be weighted lines, they can be tapered lines, whatever you really like for your style. But I think they do a lot of good to show that direction that you get as the fingers wrap around this object. Now, the other thing that's really important, we won't make this about rendering a whole lot, because they'll be other sections where we'll get more into stuff like that. But, the little bit of rendering that you do can be highly impactful. You can do a little bit of a drop shadow from each finger, each little area the knuckle, you can get a little bit of the lines over here from the knuckles. You could add them to these two, but not these two. Again, that little bit of variation is so important. Then you can add a little bit of drop shadow from areas like these, little round overshadows. They don't have to be very prominent. Again, that whole thing of overdoing stuff. Play around with it obviously, try some stuff where you overdo it so that you can really see the difference by comparison. But I would say if nothing else, just add little hints of it and then slowly work into more. Then again about that variation, you want to have areas where there's a little bit heavier shadow, and you want to have areas where there's a little bit more of a bend rather than that straight line we talked about, so just little bits of that. You want the wrinkles in the fingers to have some variation. If they're all the same weighted line, they won't have nearly the effect that you're after and so on and so forth. Just like that, we've got a hand that's reacting with an object. We can keep taking that further and further. It can be a drop shadow from the fingers onto this like that, there can be a drop shadow here from the object onto the hand, and so on and so forth. Now let's go ahead and do the next pose. 5. Hand Clinching or Stressed: Okay, so for this next one, I want to really illustrate the bending of the fingers. Again the fact that they all reside or take their own angles from one another as a really important thing to get in the habit of drawing and understanding. Let's go and work on a poles that's got a lot of expressiveness to it. Hence, what we'll do, we'll first define the opening of a hand. That can be done again, with just a block shape. We can do that point to where the middle finger is, something like that. We can do the thumb rather quickly like this and the pad of the thumb like this. What we're going to do is we're going to have this hand really an intense grasping pose. This is really great for comics obviously and pretty much anything, any expressiveness, storytelling wise. You always need this type of hand pose, in my opinion, that extreme moment. We've got the hand like this and what we're going to do is we're going to draw the fingers folding in and on themselves a bit with a bit of stress. This can be tricky to do I'll be honest, it's taken me a while to get confident with this pose because there's a lot of dynamics here and then it's hard to train yourself to almost go against what you would think about the hand or the shape of the fingers. Again, it's that the common thing seems to be to want to draw the fingers pointing in the same direction. But with the pose like this, you have to not only angle each one of them independently this way. They fan out a bit like that. But also you have to angle them out and then bring them back in visually. The hand does this quite a bit and that's why the hand is so tricky. It just seems to go, to and fro or back and forth prospectively. Really easy to get confused by this and you're probably, even see in a little bit of it, of confusion, even as I illustrate it like this, I have to rough sketch through it and make little adjustments, incremental changes as I always talk about and that's okay. I want to show you that, I tried to talk about this in a lot of my lessons but I don't always have a clear, concise picture going into the ideas. I know roughly what I'm looking for, but I incrementally change things because this days when you just don't see it as well, but you still got to get it done. That's when you rely on your techniques and that's what I'm doing here. I'm struggling to really see it, but I've done it before, so I know I can do it but will it come out as good as I would like? That's always the question we have to ask ourselves. I always think that if you do enough of this, you'll still do good enough on your bad days. That's part of being a professional. Once you get good enough, even your bad days will be good enough by comparatively or whatever, you'll still manage to get through it. Would we love for everything to be just amazing? Of course. That's the goal, but the main thing is to train yourself to be able to do well enough even when you're not feeling up to par. Hopefully you can see that I'm trying to really angle these fingers and again, I'm going to start looking down on my hand and go on, "Okay, I'm I doing the claw properly?" This is the claw. You're afraid of the claw. The claws that come in and it has to bend inwards. I want to bring this pointer finger in a little bit more so I might adjust that a bit. It's almost like the pointer finger and the middle finger should be a little bit closer by comparison but I really want to stretch almost the imagination of this pose. I'm going to go and leave it like that and see if I can refine this, this way and still make it work. Let's try that. I'm going to soft erase this down and scale it up a bit more. Poses like this are always tricky for me, so I like to have as much room to work as possible. Again, this is where I'm going to get in here and try to land some of the more organic field to the lines. Clean it up hopefully not making it look overly tense. Now I will say that certain areas of the skin, when it's really compressed and stressed, I guess, it's really flexing. You'll get this effect where it'll go and obviously get the separations of the wrinkles, but you'll get this effect sometimes where it goes back and then back out the other way. I seemed to notice that when I'm studying against stressed or overly flexed area of the body. It'll compressed that way and change shape or a little more dramatically in that smaller area. I'll get small wrinkles in here to try to figure out all this webbing would connect to the hand there, bring it back out. I think it's just really important to constantly move the line back and forth. Now, obviously, if you do that too much, you're going to maybe end up with something that looks a little too mushy. But I would definitely say that it's better to air on the side of moving the line back and forth more than keeping it to stuff. Because unless of course your style is as just that and you're really going for a very structured style. But if you need to add more of an organic field to your work, you really want to move these lines back and forth, use lots of curves and that should help to soften up the work. Okay, so another tricky part of the hand. Once again, looking down at my own hand trying to visualize this is the webbing. The webbing from finger to finger will go across but then, you're going to see plain changes on some of it. I don't know that we're going to see it all the way across because that would again look too repetitive. But you're going to see a little bit of this plain change right there and then we're also going to see the round over of the pad of the finger here. Then the way that it transits into the other part of the pad, the hand down here. I'll get some of this and they're larger part of the hand. This one generally is smaller and a different shape altogether. It comes up more on the side. Now for that middle finger, which I generally would have started with this, but I think we're okay. Well, see here. We want that separation of the parts, and you see I'm jumping right into the fingernail here, which I probably shouldn't have. But it's really important for an angle like this, falls like this to show that change in direction, it's really a quick way to define that. That's why I went right to it, because it helps me to see it visually. This is what I'm after. I think the trickiest part about this is when they start to turn a little bit, you going to get a tiny bit of this plane change right here. If you could see that, you've got the part right here. Then the plane change to the finger on the side. It tends to flatten out a little bit right there. But I think I've almost skipped the lines too far over. Let me try that again. Let's traces this back. I think that finger just looks too smooth going up. It almost looks like to consistent of a line. I'm going to bring that over a little bit. This is what I'm always talking about when I say nudging the lines, really trying to explore the shapes, move things around to see if I can do a little bit better than I had previously. Always check in the work that way. We'll probably come back to that as it doesn't look entirely correct to me, but okay. Now the ring finger, and again, just hitting that plane change and drawing that segment of the finger to be entirely back onto itself, folding back over. This is always just a really tricky part for me to visualize and get right. I still feel like I got a long way to go to get it as right as I would like, as correct as I would like, whatever. But it's definitely worth exploring. It's definitely worth studying this because it's, such an expressive type gesture or the hand. I said, lots of opportunities to use something like this when drawing comics. This one's a bit trickier. What I need to do here is show even a little bit at the top are those next angle of segment to the pinkie. It becomes a lot trickier to envision how to really showcase that, how to angle it. Show the back of this just a little bit, and that final segment work connects to the hand, and we'll drop in that nail quickly. Just to really quick way to finish off the finger and make it look more dimensional. Here we can have it sought to connect to the back of the hand, like this, you add a few wrinkles over to here. I can also try to illustrate some of the parts. I want to make these look a bit different. Again, instead of me shading each one like this, because that would immediately distract and make it too repetitive. I have to just try to pick at it, and add a little shadow here, a little there. Leave the rest alone, stuff like that. It's always good to think about it like that as you're doing it, just where working slowly hint to certain areas of it, but not all throughout the entire illustration. Now we've got enough of that in there. Obviously, there's still a lot of rough lines in there that we could clean up. Sometimes I should like even that stuff in there, but I'll software raise some of it back. Then I'll what will do just to further illustrate some of the changes of direction. We'll put in little bits of drop shadows and we'll just do that with blind way. We won't do a whole lot of shapes of shadow on this one. But I always love getting in here and doing just a little bit of line weight like this, to really push those forms around. Something as simple as that to me adds a lot more dynamic to it. I will say I can get in here with more line weight and really start to build up the depth. I can add more line weight on the areas that are closer to the viewer. A little bit of heavier line weight on areas that go in front of other areas of the illustration. Lots of ways to really get line weight in there and make it more effective, make it work effectively in your work. You can have fun with it and start doing little hairs and things like that and really give it another effect altogether. Little wrinkles here, we can do a little bit of line weight here, or I shouldn't say wind wave, but just a little bit of line work bear to show the plane change. Hopefully you see rather quickly we've got a little bit more expressive, I don't know if I like the hairs are now, might be one of those. Might shave those. But you know, it's got a little bit more emotion than the other hands do. That's really what we're after, we want to try all these different hand poses and gestures and figure out how much energy and emotion we can convey in them. Because that's going to translate really well into our storytelling and give us overall better narrative to what we're doing. Explain more of the story with that. Lots of gestures and lots of ways to convey that with hands. Now let's go ahead and move on to the next one. 6. Drawing a Fist Towards Camera: Okay, so now let's study the fist and let's do it from a forward facing shot. So those should be pretty quick because you can actually get this. It should seem almost simplistic after doing soils and other poses well. Again, the relationship of the knuckles, the larger middle knuckle there, I would say with a shot like this, the main thing is, you maybe try not to draw them all straight down like this. So you want to focus on little bits of shift here like this, so you compress them more. I'm going to get a little bit of the skin kind of pumping around right there. Then the thumb is going to come up, shift and around like this. I think the other helpful thing to remember is that the thumb generally will fall in a pose like this to the middle of the middle finger. So if you start to draw the middle finger like this, thumb will end up somewhere in the middle around about right by there. You can use that as a bit of a guide. So we'll start with that larger middle knuckle like this, and it will have these kind of slope under and then back up to the next knuckle under a backup. What I'll generally do to whenever I draw handles like this. If I do each one of these with the same repetitive behavior, it looks just too repetitive. So what I'll do is generally when I get to the pinky, or maybe round over the pinky knuckle or something like that. Just again, trying to think of ways to make it not look too mechanical and too repetitive. Now we've got the knuckles here and again, we don't want this lineup entirely. Probably we do the pointer finger a little bit higher like this, I have these go back like this. Then have these do the plane change pointing back away from the viewer like this, and get this thumb into place. So this is another tricky thing whenever you're trying to make the thumb look like it comes from obviously the recess space so from the back and come up and around the rest of the fingers. That's always a tricky thing to get right. It's really, I think that the best way to do it is where you get just the right overlap and bend to the skin as it goes around. So have to play around with these shapes like that doesn't look like the right wrinkle, but you'll get probably one wrinkle there other one back here. Then it dissipates or whatever falls behind there. Then it's, it's tricky, but you got to get just the right positioning of a knuckle. I think the knuckle would actually be lower to the thumb, like tell them this way, something like that. I'm going to raise his original wines back a little more, and get this angle here, let's try something like that. You might get a little bit of here, the palm back here, depending on the angle of the rest of the arm there and some of the thumbnail or there again, great way to immediately convey the depth and the wrinkles from the knuckle there. Okay. Let's say it's enough of our rough sketch in place. We've got enough information there to work with, and let's try to make this look a little more impressive now. Then also, if I had to really analyze it, the thumb still looks a bit clunky. So to me that's always the trickiest part of getting poles like this to look right. Past that It's probably that fanning of the knuckles and making sure that they all are a little bit more independent from one another. But it's really that thumb that will give me the most trouble from this type of poles. Okay, so as I clean this up, I want to bring this knuckle over through here, I want to connect it across, but I want to try to make these look a little bit different from one another. So, I might have one have a slightly different angle. The way that it bends on word or tapers or more into this inner part of the skin. I have this one a little more flattened over. Then I might take that pinky knuckle and just really rounded over quite a bit. Again, just trying to envision a little bit of more of an organic feel as I do this. So, I might make one knuckle a lot more defined, the heavier shadow and then just slightly hint towards the other other knuckles. Again with the skin here I might have it come over down this way and then another shape coming out more to add a little more skin or flush right there. Another tricky part, I think with this type of poles is it's real easy to want to make these knuckles appear just overly angular. Again, for a stylized representation, that might be fine, but if we want it to look more soft and more walled drawn, more organic or whatever you want to call it, It's going to need to be a little bit more of a smooth transition. But you can see as I use these smooth lines bending back into space, it doesn't have that real definitive edge. It doesn't convey that as well. So I have to make sure that with my rendering I can get that across. We can also use a shape like this. I'll probably use more of a downward bend for the pinky, but then for the more pronounced knuckles, I'll do this more elaborate shape, a shadow effect right there. Again, they're a little too aligned. So you got to be careful of that. I'll probably bring the pointer fare up quite a bit higher. So like this hand and I'll even take this opportunity to like draw the pointer finger a little bit more on its own angle. So I'll maybe just a little bit more outdoors camera. I'll try to do that by raising this first overlap of skin like this, like it's coming out towards the viewer a little bit more. I can also reinforce that with the shape of shadow or the shadow that it casts on the other hand or the other fingers, you would say. So this is more stylized when I start to do this, I guess because this isn't generally what I see when I look at a realistic hand, but if you really want to give it more shape and more feel, you can get in here and start doing more with the wrinkles and the shading and the effect and take it as far as you like. Then for this part, I want these wrinkles to come back this way. When I get this knuckle more pronounced right here. Then for the thumb here again, I told you this is the area I probably struggled with the most. I think one of the things that might help is I think the thumbnail and needs to be quite a bit larger my comparison, so I'm going to increase the size of that. I want to change the shape of the thump so it looks a bit hard. Draw that through here a bit. I want to get somebody's wrinkles into place. Again, I want there to be a good variation in the way that I draw the wrinkles. So not only the distance in between the lines on a little bit of various line, line weight. As I do this to hopefully give it some depth. I'll just play around with that and likewise here want to get some poles' wrinkles on the place. You can actually use those wrinkles to direct the plain change or the perspective as well. So if they're pointing downward like you got them on the pink here, then it gives the illusion that the pinky is tucked down and inward more versus where if they're pointing slightly upward, then now those fingers, the knuckles would appear to be coming out towards camera just a little bit more, at least that's the way I'm trying to convey at when I illustrate like that. So hopefully that I translate well. Okay. Let's say we want to do something like that, now I'm going to kind of cheat just a little bit because I'm just going to go ahead and add some wines like I like to do right here because it helps to again convey that plain change rather quickly. Just like that, we've got that in there and then we could take the back palm area that you're seeing picking around. We could shade that back a bit or do whatever we need to, to make that look more in the backdrop of what's going on here. A little bit of shading or something to push that back. Likewise, we can increase the line weight to the other fingers and thumb to help push this forward by comparison. So hopefully that gives the look that I'm after. Obviously what stylization you can take this as far as you want, but I would say probably about right there. Then I can even do a little bit of line weight off the plain change of the thumb here. I don't know if that does much for it, but we could try up. Okay, so now let's go ahead and do the next pose and see what we come up with. 7. Fist Tilted Upward: So now I want to do one more fist poles and this one I want to show from the inside of the fist, so it's like hair, but I want to show the plane changes the knuckles one more time because it's always important to realize how much dynamic movement you have in something like the fist and the hand. What I want to do here is get the thumb and the pad in there pretty quickly. I want to show you how the fingers can rotate around. On these other ones, they occupy a little bit of the same dimension or same plane. But then a lot of times the fingers can shift and you'll get different angles [inaudible]. Hopefully I'll be able to convey that here like as it starts to wrap down right here, you'll get multiple sides of the pinky here. So you've got a bit of the part work connects to the back of the hand, all the way to where it points back into the palm. The lower smaller part of the pad of the hand down here and then the sides of the finger and the rankles back here. Something like this. What happens here is, I think it becomes tricky because again, they're shifting so much. These fingers are fanning. They're each going on a little bit different direction than one another and you're getting multiple plane changes from these fingers as I do that. This is, in my opinion, a really good one to study and to practice, because of all those things that you got to take into account when you're drawing it. Again with the thumbnail, we can quickly show the direction of that hand or the finger pretty easily. If we draw a continuous line right through here, it really shows how much the thumb is in front of the other part of a hand. For instance, if this is a raised back, then it immediate looks more connected and also makes it look like it's less of an angle change. But if you draw that line right through, it almost becomes more prominent or does become more prominent. Something like that. The connection to the wrist generally it will taper inward and back out. So those are rough sketch to it. Let's go and soft erase this down, try to make it look a little bit more impressive. Again, now I want to get in here and finalize the work a bit more. I want to really try to show some separation to the fingers. I really want to make each one of them appear to be on a little bit different angle from one another. So with the finger or the pointer finger, it's real easy because we get some of the side of the plane change and we get some of the wrinkles on the inner palm. That's pretty easy to make that one appear different from the others. I've got this wrinkle in the wrong spot. It needs to be back to [inaudible] , something like that. Then when we get to the middle finger, we can just make that look more pronounced. We can also bring this up a bit higher and as we bring it up higher, it's also going to look like it goes past and back like you're going to bring the line work back a little bit like that to make it more pronounced. So you're getting a bit of the side of the knuckle from there and obviously the wrinkles, we'll get to that in a second. Then as we draw this finger, this is where it starts to shift. So we want a little bit of the back of the knuckles. So you're going to get a tiny bit of that transition there of the knuckles. Then the finger coming out towards the viewer like this. This one coming out towards the viewer even more so and then tucking down and inward. Again, compressing into the palm of the hand. So there's lots of reasons why this can be confusing at first to draw and why shear practice and volume of the studies will help to make more sense. But you learn so much. I'd rather study complex poses and things that seem confusing to me. I always feel like a walk-away with so much more knowledge experience through that versus drawing things that I'm already good at, I'm confident at. This is obviously one that's a little bit trickier I think, but it's really worth it to get past them. Again, little line breaks here and there trying to see where I can bend the lines to make it look more skin-like. I think in the very beginning it's always just, put a curve here, put a curve there, you don't think a whole lot about it. But then as you start to do more and more of this, you start to think about, what if this curve bent back just a little bit right here and then curve the other way. You get a little bit more deliberate in what you do, and why you do it. Some of the little wrinkles here. A little separation in line work as I go, just try to break it up. I think there's a lot that can be said for doing the line breaks. It seems to add a lot more interesting effect to the work. I picked that up from just watching more experienced artists do their comic and illustration work. I notice when I pick up the panel out, they do a lot of attentional line breaks. Why are they doing that? I just started doing more of it on my own and introducing it into my own work. So again, with the rankles trying to really show the differences from finger to finger and the position of it. I'll try to eliminate overly straight lines like this one. So I might have this knuckle more pronounced right there and there have bend back just a little bit. Some of the wrinkles on the inside of the palm. So as I wrap this one up and I'll start to add a little bit of shading for the plane changes of the fingers in that, but that's really is. So when closing with what we're doing here, the best thing that I could say obviously is to do lots and lots of studies, lots and lots of variation of hand poses and realizing that maybe the first 20 or 30 are going to be bad or the first 50 or 100, I don't even know that you need to put a number, a numeric value on it. But just realizing that it's okay to do bad sketches, especially of hands, they are just so tricky, but it's okay to do bad sketches of anything because those mistakes are what that's going to lead you to making the right choices. The main thing is to just log in lots and lots of studies, lots and lots of different poses. I guess because really you don't know when it's going to make sense, but it will make sense, it will click at some point. The more you catalog those, the quicker it's going to happen. Just take solace in that idea really, the more you log in, the more you fill up those sketchbooks with hands and faces and whatever it is you're struggling with that day or in that area of your work, that's the sooner you're going to beat it, that's the quicker you're going to get there. Hopefully this has given you some ideas on how you can do your own studies and how you can get past those roadblocks on your own. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions, as always, I'm here to help. I appreciate you tuning in and watching this with me and conducting these studies and learning these lessons. I very much appreciate the support. Keep up the good work, and I will talk to you soon.