I’ve been working on some hands lately. I wouldn’t say I’m “fluent” in hands, meaning I can’t get always get them right off the top of my head. But I feel I’m getting there.

I’ve been working on different hand gestures that put the fingers into some interesting angles.

When it comes to drawing anatomy and making it look correct, the role of shading plays an important part. We all pretty much know what parts of the body look like because we’ve been looking at other humans our whole lives, so that means we know when something anatomically “doesn’t look right”. While drawing these I noticed that some hands didn’t quite look right until I threw in some shading. The reason being it creates a sense of 3D-ness and reveals the contours of the object, which we can relate to our prior knowledge of human anatomy.

In the case of hands the shading is important to show things like the knuckles and the little areas that overlap.

I hope you enjoyed these little doodles. I will add some more as I have a little play.

If you draw or are interested in drawing I’d love to hear what you think.