December 2021: Hands, Hands, Hands

I like to do sketches. I'd love to be able to go beyond sketches and still have it look decent, but unfortunately my brain just doesn't like to think in colours and I'm rightly shit at working in details. Up to now I've just stuck with sketches, getting used to sketching human figures in different poses, but with little details. That's more or less alright, if I just want to give reference material for the cool decker I'm gonna play in a Shadowrun campaign, but there's a few parts of the body I'm still very bad at posing, or even just sketching out decently.

I've tried rectifying my being crap at sketching hands a few times, but I've never come out with a consistently decent way of drawing hands. And it's such an important and expressive part of the body too, it's not like nobody will notice, if I gloss over them. That left me with two options: Pivot to a chibi-style, or have all hands conveniently out-of frame. I usually went for option 2.

The thing is: I've seen a few decent ways of drawing hands before, and I've had decent results too here and there. I think I might have just lacked the practice, so this time I'm using my 90 or so minutes per week to draw as many decent looking hands as possible.

Week 1:

I've found, that time really flies when I do something like this. Sketching just gives a lot of freedom for the non-creative part of the brain to go off to do something else. However, before I started with the actual sketching, I went over some easy anatomy. I've tried learning bits of anatomy here and there, and since I like to do things compactly, and don't have a deadline for either improving my drawing chops, or learning anatomy, I decided to parallelize them. That means, that later down the line, I will have to spend extensive time with the head too, I suppose, but maybe that's not such a bad idea. I'm also bad at coming up with hairstyles.

I got as far as getting all the bones of the hand in order, as well as learning what the back of the hand is referred to (it's the dorsal plane, in case you were interested). Over the next few weeks I should be able to get sort out the muscle groups, and maybe if stuff turns out well, maybe we'll get to the nervous system too. The art/anatomy book I looked into, also happened to mention that there is usually a slight outward bend of the fingertips, if the hand is relaxed. I hadn't really been aware of that fact, and I'll try to keep that in mind moving forward.

I'll start off with what I know, just to get into the spirit of things. Hands without complicated objects, in a comfortably large size. To be fair, I really don't need close-ups of hands all that often generally, but I reckon it'll help me get the basics down, and get familiar with the structure. Much of the learning process is understanding the construction and following that, getting used to perspective work. My plan is to do a few pages worth of these very basic, relaxed hand poses, then graduate to maybe some object interactions in week 2, before scaling everything down. That should give me about a week of buffer in case something goes horribly wrong, or life-things end up eating copious amounts of my time.

This is everything I got at the end of Week 1. Yep. Two pages. This is not 90 Minutes, I'm aware. This really is closer to 45, but somehow time has been short this week and sometimes we just don't have a lot of time to draw a large number of disembodied hands. Shocker, right? Either way, I think for what it's worth, this is pretty decent.

These are of course way too large to be practical in most applications, but I feel that the proportions aren't too far off in most of these, and a good number doesn't look too stiff.

Granted, I've used references for most of these, but nobody said I could come up with positions on my own.

Week 2:

Two things: I stopped actively using references, so that's why the proportions are significantly more wonky this time around. I'm not sure how I can improve that beyond practice. Generally I think the individual elements seem like they have a tendency to be a little bit too skinny and I'm somehow still not clear on the length of the fingers.

Also I'm clearly struggling with more intricate positions the fingers take on whenever they have to wrap around an objects in a way that goes beyond just closing around them more or less parallel. Going forward I'm assuming that if I can manage to sketch a violinist's bow-hold, I'll be golden. Far way to go though, for a guy that still isn't really sure about the average length of a finger in the majorities of the positions. Right now I'm thinking that week three should contain a few more of these, before I start with the sized down set of relaxed poses. Empirically I do however need more than a week of highly irregular practice to get accustomed to improve the sketch to any notable degree, so I'm already expecting to build up a significant backlog through the rest of the month.

Week 3

Oddly enough, I think I'm more comfortable with hands grasping large objects than I am with just posing the hand, meaning I've gravely misjudged my goals at the beginning of the month. Retrospectively, I think that might be because I haven't been too confident in the thumb-placement, which is a very characteristic component of hand-object interaction. Now that I've spent drawing and redrawing thumbs every other attempt, I think that's made drawing these sketches much easier. However, in most hand-objects interactions, parts of the hand are often obscured, or covered by the object, which gives me as an amateur much more leeway. For example, I've still not quite figured out how long is too long for an index finger, and the corrections I end up making don't necessarily improve the proportions. If the hand is holding a cup though, I can just roughly estimate how big each part needs to be, but in the end, the full length of the phalanges is rarely visible, just due to the way the fingers are positioned..

Week 4

There's still some noticeable wonkiness in the proportions, and sometimes I think the angles of the distal phalanges still look a little off, although maybe that is something I could rectify with some more detail work. Either way, this exercise has primarily helped build intuition for where and how to place the thumb and the length-ratios of each finger in comparison to the others. Whether or not I'm going to revisit this will probably depend on how these improvements look in context of the entire human body - or at least a larger portion of it. I've clearly not quite gotten to the level yet, where complex hand positions look right, but I'm guessing for those I can always go back to using references - at least for now.