Tips on drawing hands.
Or actually, it's just one tip, really. I think someone suggested I should do a tutorial like. A YEAR AGO or some ridiculous length of time, but I had trouble sorting out what to say so I decided to just cut it down to the most important bits. And then it turned out that I could only really think of one actually relevant bit that can't just be found in any artist's anatomy book anywhere anyway. So, this is a shortcut I use in my head when I draw hands. I might deviantart-ize this later. Tutorials are such a pain to do in deviantart :(
Okay, the thing about hands: they're one of the most complex structures you can find on the superficial level of human anatomy. Most of the rest of the body can be simplified pretty easily into geometric shapes; the hands can be, too, but they can't be simplified into a single geometric shape, because the fingers get in the way.
SO. Excepting the thumb, which isn't a proper finger anyway, normal human fingers have three segments apiece, of decreasing length starting from the first, which is joined to the main hand. This means that the finger bends at two places. However, typically (unless you're "double-jointed" and specifically trying to subvert this) the joint furthest from the palm will bend at an angle that's a lot gentler than the one closer to the palm. For this reason, for the purposes of mental drafting, we can simplify the furthest two segments, if we wish, into a single sausage-like formation. The thumb, of course, has only two segments anyway.
HELPFUL ILLUSTRATION:
Now! When drafting the hand, I usually focus my attention mostly on the parts that are, in the diagram above, shaded blue. That is to say: the palm, the finger-sausage things (each consisting of the two finger-segments furthest from the palm), and the upper segment of the thumb. Or sometimes even the whole thumb as one unit, if you prefer. The bits that join everything together are also important, of course, but only in terms of distance: the lowermost point of the finger-sausages--which is to say, the end that's a joint, not the end that's a tip--must always be the same distance (in space, not on the paper/screen/whatever you're drawing on) away from the part of the hand-blob where its corresponding knuckle would be, and that distance is the length of the other finger-segment that goes there.
Does that make any sense at all?
Um. EXAMPLES.
So yes, finger sausages and hand blobs. Simplification of the mental draft can be quite helpful, because you're brain isn't going AUGH OVERLOAD D8 anymore. These simplified diagrams can still pretty much portray how hands move and work, even though there's so much that's missing.
With lines:
...aaaaand taking the blobs away:
...haha these are kind of half-assed and ugly but you get the idea. Feet can be made to work similarly, except the proportions are skewed differently.
In conclusion... this isn't exactly how I do it; just how I think about it, more or less. The way I think about it might be flawed. (One of these flaws: if you're lazy and inattentive like me, then it's really easy to make the second joint too stiff when doing it like this.) I hope this is helpful to someone anyway.
Okay, the thing about hands: they're one of the most complex structures you can find on the superficial level of human anatomy. Most of the rest of the body can be simplified pretty easily into geometric shapes; the hands can be, too, but they can't be simplified into a single geometric shape, because the fingers get in the way.
SO. Excepting the thumb, which isn't a proper finger anyway, normal human fingers have three segments apiece, of decreasing length starting from the first, which is joined to the main hand. This means that the finger bends at two places. However, typically (unless you're "double-jointed" and specifically trying to subvert this) the joint furthest from the palm will bend at an angle that's a lot gentler than the one closer to the palm. For this reason, for the purposes of mental drafting, we can simplify the furthest two segments, if we wish, into a single sausage-like formation. The thumb, of course, has only two segments anyway.
HELPFUL ILLUSTRATION:
Now! When drafting the hand, I usually focus my attention mostly on the parts that are, in the diagram above, shaded blue. That is to say: the palm, the finger-sausage things (each consisting of the two finger-segments furthest from the palm), and the upper segment of the thumb. Or sometimes even the whole thumb as one unit, if you prefer. The bits that join everything together are also important, of course, but only in terms of distance: the lowermost point of the finger-sausages--which is to say, the end that's a joint, not the end that's a tip--must always be the same distance (in space, not on the paper/screen/whatever you're drawing on) away from the part of the hand-blob where its corresponding knuckle would be, and that distance is the length of the other finger-segment that goes there.
Does that make any sense at all?
Um. EXAMPLES.
So yes, finger sausages and hand blobs. Simplification of the mental draft can be quite helpful, because you're brain isn't going AUGH OVERLOAD D8 anymore. These simplified diagrams can still pretty much portray how hands move and work, even though there's so much that's missing.
With lines:
...aaaaand taking the blobs away:
...haha these are kind of half-assed and ugly but you get the idea. Feet can be made to work similarly, except the proportions are skewed differently.
In conclusion... this isn't exactly how I do it; just how I think about it, more or less. The way I think about it might be flawed. (One of these flaws: if you're lazy and inattentive like me, then it's really easy to make the second joint too stiff when doing it like this.) I hope this is helpful to someone anyway.