Art Journal 017: Hands

Hands are, hands down, the hardest parts of the human body to draw in handsome illustrations. It can be a real white-knuckle affair trying to handle that sort of curving, overlapping topography but there are a handful of handy tricks you can thumb through to get a better grasp on what it is you’re trying to draw. I’ve done my best to make a little handout of thumbnails in hope that it might give you a hand with your past or future drawings.

Sorry.

It’s important to get a good grasp on how hands work because next to the face they’re the most important medium for human emotive expression in our entire visual arsenal.  We use them all the time when we speak and there is a degree of universal understanding conveyed with hands that transcends language barriers- pointing at our palm, making a fist, pointing a finger, and an upturned open palm for some examples.  There’s nuance to it too- pointing a finger is considered rude in formal contexts but it is a strong gesture so many politicians have learned to curl their index finger around their thumb and gesture with their finger knuckle (Presidents Clinton and Obama both do this very prominently).  They can express powerful thoughts all by themselves but they often work to emphasize and subtextualize alongside spoken word and facial expression.  Hands are a powerful tool in your visual language and if you’re making comics it’s easy to just hide them off-panel or put them in your characers’ pockets but it behooves you to know how they work so you can get the most out of your expressions.  So let’s start from the ground up and get a sense of what we’re dealing with.

Just like the skull, we’ll start with an anatomical look at the structural foundation of the hand, namely its bones. The hand is made from three kinds of bones (A I), the carpals, metacarpals and philanges.  Your carpals are the cluster of stony bones at your wrist; there’s not an abstract number or arrangement of them, there’s generally two rows of bones that correspond to specific other bones.  The more familiar-looking bones are the metacarpals and these make up both your palm and your fingers and thumbs.  Your metacarpals connect to your carpals in a way where each finger is “rooted” on one carpal except the middle and ring finger share the big carpal in the middle.  This will show its importance later.  At the end of your metacarpals are your philanges, which are the pointy little fingertip bones that cap off your fingers.  

The two bones at the bottom are your forearm bones, the Radius and the Ulna (A II).  It’s easy to remember which is which when you consider how they work in relation to your hand.  When we turn our wrists and flip our hand this way or that our carpals aren’t actually turning on the ends of our arm bones, the whole forearm actually twists to allow our hands to turn at all.  Your Radius is the smaller bone which turns radially around the bigger bone, called the Ulna. The anatomical position of the arm is one wherein the palm is facing forward at the side of the body.  When the arm is in the anatomical position the radius and ulna will be parallel to one another.  The ulna is the bone your elbow actually is, and it connects to your hand at your pinkie.  Your radius is the smaller bone which isn’t your elbow and that one connects at the thumb.  When you rotate your palm 180 degrees inward from the anatomical position your radius, rooted at your elbow joint, rotates and crosses overtop of the ulna (relative to our frontal perspective) and turns the thumb-side of the hand around the wrist, thus giving us the ability to flip our hands around.  It also puts a hard limit on the range of rotation our wrist has, since our radius physically crosses over the ulna and can’t pass through it we only have the 180 degrees to work with, but we’re resourceful.  That’s more than enough for us!

Going back to our fingers for a moment, it’s important to highlight why our palms are made of metacarpals and not the chunkier carpals like our wrist is, even though the palm is not something we consider terribly flexible.  Because of our first row of metacarpals being arranged like a row of logs our palm is able to cup and hold things much easier.  In this cutaway of the palm (A III) we can see the arrangement of the fingers creates a concave arc in our palm- they’re not arranged flatly.  This enables our hands to make all kinds of fun gestures but it also is the root of why the whole thing is so hard to draw.  A gently rounded backhand opposite a soft pitted palm with a semi-independent “island” for the thumb and fingers who connect not at the base at which we see them from our palm but a short ways back, behind the webbing of our fingers all lends itself to creating tons of headaches.  And while it’s important to know how a hand works it’s also important to learn yourself a few tricks for how to shorthand it, to save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run.

Here is my shorthand for a basic hand (A IV).  When I draw a hand I tend to think of the palm as sort of a square divided into quadrants, where the lower two quadrants are rounded heels of the palm and the thumb-half of that pair being something of a triangle mounted to the side of the hand.  While there’s exceptions to the rule, generally biological men have wider, squarer palms than biological women, but generally the length of your fingers are consistently half the total length of your hand from wrist to tip.  Remember back when we were talking about carpals and how your middle and ring finger both rooted in that one central big bone?  Well in practice they happen to be closely linked to one another (in that the tendons that control them have very close roots) so when you bend one the other moves a little bit as well, and when your hand is idle those two fingers tend to stick close together.  A one-two-one idle spread can give a hand a natural spread with little thought or puzzling out how the fingers arrange and it’s a good rule to keep in your back pocket.  The middle two fingers are buddies, they’re almost like one big finger but not quite. If you want to save some time keep that in mind and use it to your advantage.

When I was young one of my formative experiences came while playing Goldeneye 007 on my family’s N64.  This was one of my first major introductions to 3D modeling in games and the efficiency of the polygons they used was strangely informative to my young mind.  One detail that stuck out to me from the beginning was the way they modeled hands (B I).  It wasn’t a cube or a circle like l was used to seeing in shorthand, it was a sort of three-dimensional trapezoid, like a rectangular box where one face (the knuckles) was larger, the other (the wrist) smaller and the four connecting faces angled inward to create the hand.  The top plane had art for the curled finger and thumb, the front showed the gaps of our fingers terminating at the web of our fingers before reaching the knuckles and the bottom showed the front faces of the fingers curled against the thumb.  It was such a plain deconstruction of the major facets of the curled fist presented in such plain terms that I actually ended up drawing fists “the Goldeneye way” for a couple years.  I eventually learned to open up the box, so to speak, but it’s probably the best example I can think of to simplify how a curled fist works.

How the fingers -actually- curl is a bit tricker to convey in our drawings.  The joints of our finger bones basically have an elastic spring on either side of them, both the front and the back.  When we’re not exerting any effort on moving our fingers they will fall into a natural state balanced by these two tendonous springs (B II)- a death scene or an unconscious character can be conveyed really tactfully by drawing the hand in this neutral position cutting into the camera, since it’s a very specific curl of the fingers its broader meaning is easily conveyed.  In this shot we can also see the way the padding of the hand works; the creases of the forward two quadrants of the palm tend to isolate our index finger and the padding of the remaining fingers tends towards arrangements that parallel the metacarpal connection to the three major finger carpals (at least when looking at my own hand it does this, consult your own for further reference).  When we extend our fingers outward the tendons on the back of our hands pull our fingertips back and the fingers uncurl- you can see this happening if you look at the back of your own hand.  Likewise when we curl our fingers forward it’s the tendons at the front pulling them forward into a curl- we can see -these- tendons as the thin vertical ridges in our wrist.  Muscles pull tendons connected to bone and the muscles for our fingers are all the way up in our upper forearm, you can wriggle your fingers in a wave-like pattern and watch the muscle just below your elbow rolling like the tide.  As a rule no muscle in the body ever pushes, they all pull, so any movement we have is a product of two sets of muscle groups, one to pull in either direction (biceps and triceps control our elbow movement; pectoralis and trapezius control our shoulder movement in tandem with the trapezius; our lips and tongue are made of two muscles connecting to one another and are the only place where one muscle connects to another and not to a bone.) 

To help illustrate the way the hand opens up from a fist I’ve drawn facet lines on my example illustrations to sort of “box off” the parts of the hand; you can see how the fingers become rounded little stacks of boxes and where the palm and thumb sides articulate with the rest of the hand.  Little guidelines like these to turn the fingers into boxes can be very helpful for getting a sense of what is pointing where when everything just looks so round and squishy.  What happens when you curl your fingers into a fist makes sense when you extend your fingers outward and look at the lines your hand is making- your fingers all intersect at a point in the pit of your wrist, right where those tendons happen to be most prominent, and forms a fanned triangular shape.  When we curl our fingers into a fist they don’t all curl straight down and parallel to one another, our fingers all curl inward towards the pit of our palm (B III) or, specifically, along the lines of their tendons connecting at the intersection of their wrist!  So when we draw fingers curled into a fist we want to give our fingers an inward angle and not a straight parallel row of finger segments.  There is a biological argument made by anthropologists that our hands evolved the way they did specifically to lock our thumbs over our fingers and make an optimal fist for punching one another- it’s a compelling argument in the context of other great apes lacking this fist-making ability and the very precise proportions needed to make a fist- but whether or not it holds merit, in terms of art all the parts fit right together when we make a fist. It all makes perfect sense!  Also, as a side-note, don’t draw your fingers as one big mitten.  Draw them individually (usually slightly offset or not directly parallel), they’ll look much better and you’ll avoid having to unlearn a nasty bad habit in the future.

Now that we’ve explored the way a hand is built and the way fingers move, let’s look at one of the major factors in expressive hand drawing: the wrist!  The wrist plays a big role in how our hand twists or turns, whether we’re lax or tense or thoughtful or dismissive or any other expression we may wish to convey.  The wrist is important to note because it’s very easy when you’re learning to draw, or you fall into bad habits, to just plunk the hand down on the end of the forearm straight-on and then draw the fingers on the palm from there. (C I).  Whenever you’re dealing with a joint in the body- especially in the arms- you have to remember that out of a full range of motion “dead straight” is an extremely specific singular angle, and it’s not one the body falls naturally into.  Dead-straight postures imply deliberate intention to maintain that exact pose, like a soldier standing at attention or a genre-fiction superspy administering a judo chop.  Dead-straight isn’t a natural state of being so when you use it as your default position in your drawings it looks incredibly jarring and abnormal.  This is easy to do with something like the elbow but for whatever reason many artists subconsciouly regard the hand as an extension of the forearm and my advice is to instead think of the wrist as a second, more articulate elbow of the arm.  In the following example (C II) we can see how even with the exact same bicep and forearm an articulated angle in the wrist gives the hand an expressive and natural gesture that compliments the rest of the pose, in this case it’s a continuation of the arm’s curl.  It’s generally a good idea to always “break” the straightness of the wrist when you’re articulating a pose, like in this “like in this gesture” gesture of the hand (C III), or maybe you have a “who knows” expression you need to convey (C IV), who knows?  The whole expression lights up when you tilt or angle your wrists to set your hands on a natural position, it’s such a subtle thing but it goes so long towards making your characters feel more alive.  Remember: don’t just break a leg out there, break a wrist as well!

A handy thing to keep in mind when coming up with non-straight angles to draw our wrists at is the mechanical range of motion our wrists can actually move in.  We’ve explored how the radius and ulna rotate it within a 180 degree range, but there are two other axes we can pivot our hands on.  The first is a forward and backwards range of motion, sort of the natural direction our hand flops in if we just want to do floppy hands (D I). Like the radial turning of our wrist we have a 180 degree hinge turning range of motion in this direction, and although we can hit the full spectrum of angles in that range the outer five or so degrees require a bit of tension to maintain.  Most of the angles just outside the dead-on range are gentle and natural but if your hand is posing all the way forward you would likely be doing something like a Mantis-style martial art stance, and if you’re hitting the furthest-back angle your hand is likely supporting something heavy, like a waitress’s serving tray full of dirty plates.  The median angles are pretty natural and ideal but the outer degrees are extreme in ways similar to the dead-center angle, so be careful when you choose to draw them.  The third range our hands can turn on is a lateral to-the-side range with a much narrower spectrum of angles it can achieve (D II).  When our hands pivot to the side they can only really pivot in the direction of the pinkie, and even then you can hit maybe a fifty or sixty degree angle from your wrist  The really peculiar thing about this sideways range is that it only has that full sixty degrees when your hand is in that perfect straight-up angle on the forward/backward axis; if you extend it fully to one side and then try to pivot on the fore/back axis your hand will just rotate out of that side angle and into a full backwards position, for example.  Due to the way our wrist joints work it’s nearly impossible to pivot on both angles to their extremes, you can only have so much of one and so much of the other, or all of one and all of the other.  This is useful to keep in mind when we’re actually dealing with the full straight-up wrist angle because it still allows us a degree of expressiveness along that singular space.  These two wrist angles combined with the rotation of our forearm bones allow us a tremendous range of motion and expression, it is imperative that we tap into this incredible articulation in drawing our expressive hands.

As a closing set of examples of all the above information I drew a pair of hands I like to draw pretty often in my comic.  One of them is a gestural positing, like we do when we’re trying to present an argument to someone.  In this case we have Alice proposing that perhaps chasing your codeine pills with beer isn’t a fantastic habit to get into in the short-term (D III), and Lizzie defending herself, since it was just ONE beer and it was a while after she took her pills (D IV).  In these cases Alice’s expression is the one on the offensive- albeit a gentle one- so she’s tilting her hand forward.  Her palm is up to show that she’s not accusing and the rolling curl of her fingers hint at her being relaxed in spite of her argument.  Lizzie is on the defensive so her wrist is tilted backwards, palm-forward.  She’s holding a finger up since she’s making what she believes is a significant point; the curl of her knuckles on her non-pointing fingers don’t line up perfectly and likewise have a natural roll to them, and in spite of her index finger being extended the thumb still locks into place. Even without the rest of them drawn their hands can still convey their emotions, and with a little contextual speech could carry the tone all by themselves.  Hands are very valuable tools in your artmaking toolkit; if you can fit them in a composition you absolutely should.  Try not to hide them outside your panels or behind convenient things; they can be a real pain to learn but if you stick with it your art will come to life for your efforts.