2D Toolkit: Hands

Hands:
I have been continuously practising in drawing hands. These elements of human anatomy are uniquely challenging and require constant practice; they contain many bone structures in the fingers that, though operating in similar fashions, are situated in different angles and positions from one another, able to move on the knuckle largely independent from the other masses in the hand. Hands also contain a great deal of overlapping muscles and regions of skin, seen between the fingers and thumb and in the creases that form in the hand when it clasps and grips. Foreshortening is also of importance in the hand, seen when fingers are positioned closer to the point of view. This forshortening is important, as it must still convey the length of the finger whilst not detracting from the differences in size that fingers have between them. As such, these different aspects of construction come together to create a difficult piece of anatomy to illustrate. As such, I have been routinely practising in drawing hands. 

The following are numerous hand studies I have produced in this practice. Typically, I used a basic construction sketch as the frame upon which I could build the form of the hand, using block shapes to show where the palm, thumb and finger masses lay. I could then break these fundamental blocks apart into the fingers. I found that I often struggled with the proportioning of the hand, particularly in the size and length of fingers, which would often be larger and thicker than that seen on the reference photo. I found that drawing at a larger scale helped in correcting this, as - with a smaller brush set out across a wider drawing space - I was able to have greater flexibility in what I produced.