Hey Friends!

Hey friends!

It’s Meg here for TUTOR TUESDAY! Today is part one of drawing trees. I’ll do a tutorial on painting trees next time! This was a recommended tutorial, and if you have any tutorials you’d like to see just send em in here or at my personal! Have fun, keep practicing, and I’ll see you next week!

hii im sorry if this is abrupt but do you have any tips on drawing hands? :o

aa first off sorry for being so late in answering this!! ive been so busy, so this has just been sitting in my inbox ;v;i know i always say this, but im not super great w/ hands!! they’re really hard for me to draw too, i think because they’re so expressive! honestly the best way to get used to them is by studying and drawing your own hands until you’re familiar with their structure and how they work ^^ i’d recommend doing blind contours of your hands; they wont turn out great but it’ll definitely help you learn the basic anatomy of your hands. its also a good warm up for observational drawing (lol my teacher always made us do these before we could start our still lifes)ofc im sure you probably mean more stylized hands so i’ll try to break down some tips for drawing hands out of your head:(forgive these next drawings, i did them on a sleep deprived night at 3am haha)

These first two were drawn (pretty quickly) from observation of my own hand, while the two below were drawn from my head! Some noticeable differences are amount of detail put into each. In observational drawing you should be capturing each fold of the skin, and the wrinkles caused by joints bending etcIt’s hard for me to explain, but studying hands like this can help you understand the parts that make up a hand and in turn help you visualize one in your hand. You should try thinking about them in terms of 3D shapes instead of one whole object.

When i stylize hands I keep key features such as knuckles, and finger joints to make them recognizable, but I like to either exaggerate the “pointed” finger tip, or blocky shapes in the fingers. I’ll try to break it down as I visualize it:

Honestly, I’m still learning how to break down the body into shapes, but I think of the palm as a square with triangular bits coming out of it. I add a little circle on the side to represent the thumb joint too, since I think that’s definitely an important bit in making a hand read as a hand. Hands will jut out there to accommodate the thumb! When I sketch hands in my drawings I’ll often just sketch in a quick triangle and refine it during the lineart stages. I wouldn’t recommend doing that per say since its a pain, but practicing gesture drawings of hands where you use shapes to quickly sketch a base is a good idea!and for the (imo) fun bit, little tips to consider when you’re drawing hands!

The middle and ring finger tend to stick together!! Obviously that’s not always the case, but often times drawing them together can make a hand look more natural! On that note, the pink tends to be the odd one out and sticks out a lot! Consider the “webbing” we have between our fingers! When fingers are squished together it’ll fold a little bit! you can put a little line there to represent this, it really fleshes out your fingers i think! There’s a ton of this webbing between the thumbl and index finger so remember that as well!The palm can be broken down into three main parts! A hand has two fleshy lumps at the bottom, above the wrist. The biggest one is over the thumb joint, and the one under the pinky is smaller, but still sticks out a little bit past the wrist. The top portion is where the knuckles are located and the fingers will follow the arc of that portion.

When fingers are bent like on the left, The index finger tends to be the tallest and the other fingers will follow in descending height! The index finger is kind of  a “leading” finger, so its okay to exaggerate it to be longer even when the hand is not closed. This can help make the hand more expressive! Speaking of fists, using squarer shapes to draw closed fingers can make them look more believable. And since squares have harder edges this can also make a hand look angry or nervous. The tighter the fist, the more defined knuckles/joints will be! Don’t forget to consider joints when you’re drawing a folded hand either, since people tend to add too many! I personally don’t emphasize these joints too much but I still consider how they help the fingers bend! (emphasizing them can help make a hand look more bony!!)please take all this advice with a grain of salt! i pretty much just regurgitated information ive picked up by observing hands or that ive learned from other artists. I’m in no way an anatomy master, but i hope this helps a little bit!! im positive there are more thorough tutorials out there, but if you want some insight on how i draw hands, here’s this ;v;

Dune, Greg Ruth

Fitzcarraldo | Werner Herzog | 1982

(Kinski’s foot), Claudia Cardinale

The Gentleman’s Armchair