How To Draw Professional Looking Hands

Hello, I'm Di Roberts from the Insight School of Art, and I'm going to show you some simple drawing exercises and I hope you enjoy them. I'm going to show you how to draw hands, various techniques that you could use if you want to draw a hand from the front or the back for that matter. It's quite simple: a circle and a few blobs, preferably four, and a small blob coming out from the side and a wrist.

And you can gradually build this up, put some knuckles in, put some shading, think about how your thumb works and where it ends up, and as you can see it's a very simple quick way of drawing an accurate (cartoonified, but accurate) hand. However, if you want to draw a hand really stickly, how often do you see a hand placed like that? Not very often and only when you're learning to draw. If you want to draw a hand accurately, with a lot more precision and fun, draw the real thing.

I will put my hand there just for a second. This is what I'm going to be working from: my own hand, relaxed, curled, loads of shading, loads of different shapes, and the starting point is to draw what you see, not what you think it looks like; don't make anything up. So it's basically drawing the shapes that are in front of you.

You can ignore all the details at this stage, you're drawing a line drawing of the shapes. So that line goes there, there's a little line there. If I visually measure to the back, and then have a look at the shape along the side there, it matches, more or less, that angle and then it tips around and there's the front of the finger visible there, and all I'm doing is drawing what I see.

I'm not making anything up. I'm referring to the shapes in front of me and whether you're drawing from the real thing or drawing from an image, the same rules apply. Keep looking.

Keep drawing what you see. Don't make anything up. If you want to learn to draw accurately, this is the only way you can do it.

Once you start to look away and work from memory, you're losing the reality of what you're drawing. The little finger from here is just a little blob. As soon as I put the nail there, it becomes more finger-like.

Lines are missing of my rings for now. More lines, more lines and then I'm going to move my hand away a little bit so that I'll see the shadows clearer and show you how to draw them. Let's just put that nail in a little bit more accurately and there's a bit of nail sticking out of the top there.

Okay, it's the shadows that make the hand really stick. Let's get rid of this outside line here. There are no lines in nature, there are areas of dark and areas of light, so by letting that line form the edge of the dark shadow, you lose the line altogether and it becomes a lot more of an accurate feel (a more natural feel).

We can put the lines of the knuckles in and then let's shade down the center there because it's quite a contrast between dark and light at that point and across to the thumb. And as the thumb curls round and meets the fingers, it becomes very dark at the side and that'll help to give the feeling of three dimensions of depth in the picture. Okay, over the top, that shadow curves right the way around.

Get rid of that dark line and here again, get rid of the line. Turn it into the shadow. It's very dark under that finger.

It gradually lightens up. The nail: dark at the side and lighter as we go along. You could spend ages doing the shadow and the reflection (shadow, reflection, shadow, reflection, all the way along), but I'm going to do it at speed so you can get quite a quick impression of how to draw the hand.

Very, very dark in here underneath that finger and that creates the illusion of depth. The darker the shadows, the more the depth. Just come around here.

Again, shadow at the side, get rid of the outside edge, darken up that nail (this one's a similar tone), darker in between the two fingers, and all the time I'm referring to my hand. I'm not making it up. Even where the