Hand drawing

Everyone has tried to avoid drawing hands at some point, maybe by posing their figures with their hands insouciantly behind their backs, or with mittens or even better a muff. The challenges of drawing hands are several, not least that the parts often seem to exceed the whole - it often seems impossible to fit five fingers on the palm, which is no doubt why cartoon characters from Mickey Mouse to Bart Simpson have four fingers.

It seems to make sense to divide the hand into three parts: the wedge of the palm, with the mass of the thumb as a separate mass, then the fingers. The four fingers of course can hold all sorts of poses - I don't think anything is more articulate and expressive than the human hand, besides maybe a cat's tail - so it takes careful study.

I copied one very expressive hand here from Burne Hogarth, who was very helpful in visualizing the knuckles of the fingers as a series of disks the flesh of the fingers bulge or pinch at.

It was in class just this November that I noticed for the first time that the horizontal lines on the palm (the 'heart' and 'head' lines in palmistry) line up with the knuckles on the back of the hand, something you think I would have noticed before now.

The last drawing here is a Disney model sheet from the 30's of Mickey's hands. This comes from the always-interesting site Animation Archives, where lots of wonderful how-to-draw images, most from decades past, can be found.