The guide for the rookie Illustrator V4

The worst nightmare of the novices, the breakers of determination, this and many more myths will be solved in this guide dedicated only to what is usually one of the most frustrating stages of drawing.

The biggest advantage we have to practice is in front of us and we do not realize it, Use photos of your hands or draw them while you see one of yours.

You can also search for images on the Internet and draw the lines to visualize the base.


There are many styles of hands that are used in illustration, from hyperrealism to cartoon.

But even the variety is much bigger when we talk about techniques to make them, in this guide I will show you the classic way of drawing them and two other ways that can be used.

• The technique that I use.

This technique for drawing hands is just like an upgrade of the universal geometric technique, since what I do is make figures a little more organic for the main cube.

After that, we make the line of the knuckles that, although it will always be curved, depending on the hand, the shape will be different.

After this step, the rest is to make the circle of the knuckles guiding us from the previously created line, and the guide lines of the fingers and their corners.

• Geometric Technique.

This technique, as its name indicates, is using cylinders, squares and circles, which allow us to easier visualize the shape and position of the fingers.

Even so, the curvature of the knuckles is done to correctly make the exit of the fingers. The same steps are repeated as the previous technique but using these.

• Skeleton Technique.

It is a technique that I personally do not recommend since the visualization of the hand is very unintuitive,

which consists of drawing the skeleton with circles and stripes, which will form the direction of the fing.

It is simply the direction in which the knuckles are placed and represent the base of the fingers.

This curve is very important when drawing hands in complicated angles, because it will mark the order of the knuckles.

if we ignore this, the base of the fingers will be flat, deforming it.

• Drawing fingers with the same size.

This usually happens when we do not use the bases to draw the hand, the best way to avoid this mistake is to first draw the ring finger to guide yourself with it.

• Drawing the ball of the thumb very exaggeratedly or not drawing it.

This mistake happens a lot when we want to draw the hand laterally, since it is so insignificant at the time of drawing that we forget that it is there.

• Hand to face coherence.

The biggest mistake in the history of drawing hands is the size of the hands, some make them very large while others make them extremely small. This can be seen in the following examples.

Although the handling of the color is incredible and the proportions of the faces are good, the hands completely damage the illustration when clashing so much with the anatomy of the human body.

to guide yourself remember that the hand is the total size of the face minus two or one fingers of front, which depends on whether it is male or female.

It may sound simple, but the best way to practice is to use images or pictures of real hands, since all artists make mistakes to adapt things to our "style".

The most important thing to remember is to have fun, this is just a guide to learn faster. We all start by seeing our work as a hobby, and if you lose that feeling, you will most likely end up abandoning the practice.

This is all for now. See you in the next post!