Clasped Hands
For Valentine's day or any number of occasions, you may want to draw people holding hands. This can be tricky, not only is it difficult to draw hands, but you need to do two hands realistically and show the way they entwine. Here's a step by step project to help you do clasped hands for any cartoon or drawing you want to use them in.
Instructions
1. First, let's look at a diagram of the shape of the hand. One of the worst mistakes beginners make is placing the thumb wrong or making it as long as the fingers. Something about the thumb is so screwy difficult that the mind just wants to lump it in with all the fingers -- but it sticks out at an angle from the side of the hand and it's got one less joint. It's also thicker than the fingers. This is true even on a slender-fingered lady's hand. So here are two hands, drawn lightly in ink, showing the basic shape of the hand.
Copy these. Vary them. Look at your own hand flat, palms down, and try to sketch it. I've shown two versions of these hands. One is with construction shapes -- a rounded-corner rectangle for the palm, a triangular area at the base of the thumb, little round knuckles and cylinders in between. The other is drawn without the construction marks.
One of the easiest ways to do hands is to pencil the construction lines lightly and then ink the hand, erase the construction lines, add details like fingernails in the ink. It takes a little practice. But the good thing about the construction lines is that you can do them in any angle. They're shapes, so you can build something like a computer's wire-diagram model of the three dimensional shape of a hand in any position before inking it.
2. Less is more when drawing hands! One of the biggest problems that happens to artists whether cartooning or not, is that the line thickness makes fingers seem sausagy and lumpish, so drawing only one line to divide the fingers is better than two and occasionally it's a good thing to leave that line open.
Step Two is a lady's hand in a clasping position without her partner, done with the construction shapes in pencil and the final lines will be done later in ink. We will do this hand again for the final step of making two hands clasp each other.
3. Now let's get her partner's hand in there with construction lines. Don't worry about the transparency of these hand diagrams. It's okay. They will all be erased, and you can see in the last step how they'll look together. Her thumb will be coming over the top of his palm. His fingers will wrap around her hand.
So let's get his hand in then, and we'll go inking carefully when both of them are in there in the next step.
4. The previous diagram looked a bit complicated because of the number of construction lines that cross each other. The trick is to choose which ones to ink. I did the lines in brown and gave her some pink nail polish so you can see imply fingernail shapes. His nails don't show at all because his thumb is behind hers and his fingertips are around hers.
In deciding what lines to draw or not, pay attention to them as three dimensional shapes. Study them for what's in front or not. Her long fingers wrap around his palm, so I drew those first. Her thumb goes over the back of his hand, so I drew that. Then I got his and her wrists in, then I did his fingers last. If you don't like how they look, move the pencil lines first before inking.
I'll scan this before erasing so you can see the relation of the construction lines to the final lines in this step, then erase for the illustration for the article. You can do clasping hands, shaking hands, hands in different gestures better every time if you pencil in the construction lines first and think of the palm of the hand as a flat rounded rectangle with thickness, the knuckles as little spheres and the fingers as cylinders.
Remember the base of the thumb is triangular and be sure to place it carefully so that it doesn't go too far up toward the fingers, that's a bad distortion. If it goes too low near the wrist, then the hand looks more like a chimp than a human.
Hand proportion is something you can study with your own, but also draw hands from photos and from other people. Some people's middle finger is the longest, others it's the index finger. The little finger is usually the shortest. Some people's hands are narrow and long-fingered, others short and short-fingered. So whatever your hands are like, sketch hands of different types from yours.
And the next time you hold hands with your sweetie, get a friend to snap a photo of your hands with a phone cam or web cam. You'll see something a bit like this whatever the angle. With practice, you can draw clasped hands as well as a professional illustrator. Many artists fill whole sketchbooks with hands and feet, so don't be discouraged if it takes more than one try to get this right.
