How To Draw Anime Hands

Hi, my name is Laura Watton. My website is PinkAppleJam.com.

I'm a co-founder of Sweatdrop Studios and I have been illustrating in manga style for almost 15 years. Next stage, I'm going to show how to draw manga hands. Our hands are really difficult to draw and I still do have problems drawing hands.

I'm going to show you a bit of a cheat-y way, though, to get confident about drawing hands. Start with a circle, you've got your four fingers and the thumb sticking out at an angle. If we split this sphere again, put the crosshair in, you'll see that the thumb is along the middle of the sphere.

If you reference your own hand, for example, you can draw along from the bottom of the sphere to the reference lines you are drawing here. Your four fingers - everyone's fingers reach out a little differently. Your character's fingers may be completely anatomically imperfect.

You can get away with that in a lot of comics and cartoons. Basically, the index finger is going to be a little shorter than the middle finger - you can tell by the difference here. And the third finger is usually a little bit shorter than the little finger.

Of course, the little finger is very little. So that is very roughly a complete cheat-y way to get the basic style of the character's hand. The best way to draw hands is to, obviously, copy your own.

If you are right handed and you need to draw one hand, either look at your left hand in the mirror, ask your friends to pose for you, take a photo of your hands, flip it around, trace hands - there are many, many cheaty ways and serious, steady ways to draw hands. But usually, breaking it down - drawing these spheres, these crosshairs and these lines - is always a good way. I basically end up copying my left hand a lot, so perhaps I'm really good at drawing left hands, but not my right hand.

It's probably something I should practice a bit more. Very roughly, for example, just get the outlines and add in details later. You can draw very chibi hands to match your chibi style of drawing.

"Chibi" is a child-bodied, baby sort of way of drawing. Again, if you use the crosshair and the four lines, you can just draw using that same method and make your character's fingers quite stubby. In a nutshell, that's pretty much how you draw manga hands.