Not The *best* Hand I've Ever Drawn But I Figured The Example Worked Better W Something That Would Be Difficult (: - Blog Posts

I can't express how much I LOVE the way you draw hands! They are just absolutely amazing and so SO expressive. Do you have any advice on how to improve? (other than the obvious, "practice", lol)

THANK YOU!! Hands are my #1 favorite thing to draw and i love using them and touching to enhance the feeling of a drawing so that makes me so happy to hear!! lol not the dreaded 'just practice' - I tried to put together an impromptu example for you: I’ve always loved drawing hands and include them in my art a lot but I can say for certain that there was a huge boost in my abilities when i started tracing from real life images to better understand the way fingers curve and deform around objects, especially - I’ll take a reference picture or two, trace, figure out which looks better and then try to re-draw it:

You want to draw a character holding a bottle? Alright, find an object that’s about the size you want, get your camera (a shitty res phone camera will do in my case), and get to it!

I like to do some variations because sometimes things just look *goofy* when you have simpler lines depicting them, so here’s 4 different ones:

Alright, next step - rough lines over to see how it translates to 2d:

#1 looks goofy so that one's out - I like #2 the best but the grip'll translate better if I close the grip of the two first fingers, so I'll do that (or retake the picture) and then re-do it on my own while eyeballing the reference i just made (I usually just draw the lines for hands directly but if i'm having trouble i break it down into rough shapes first) :

Think of it kind of like building a neat little reference library in your own brain - next time I want to draw a hand holding a bottle I can think back on this and what I picked up :)

Thanks again, hope this helps!