Tutorial Anatomical drawing: how to draw a hand

Learn how to draw hands and fingers in an anatomically correct way with Zursoif (Miguel Bustos Gómez).

Drawing hands is one of the most recurrent difficulties faced by artists. The amount of bones, joints, muscles and tissues that compose them make them a challenge when it comes to capture them on paper.

Luckily the artist Zursoif (@zursoif), an anatomical illustrator, explains step by step how to draw a hand starting with the bones and ending with the muscles and skin. Get pencil and paper ready, and let's go!

1. Divide the hand into different parts

We will start by making a circle, which will form the palm of the hand. Then, we will divide the diameter of that circle into four equal parts.

The lower part will correspond to the carpal bones. In the remaining three parts we will place the length of the metacarpals, which we will draw starting from the middle finger to establish the midpoint. From there, we will place each metacarpus adapting it to the size that will mark the circle (that is to say, each metacarpus will have a slightly different size).

2. Draw the phalanges

Touch the fingers! The first phalanx we will draw (which will be the middle finger) will have half the length of the palm of the hand. The next two, on the other hand, will have a length equivalent to half the length of the first one we have drawn.

This last phalanx, which corresponds to the part of the hand where the nail is located, will be drawn with an arrowhead. If we look closely, we will see that this distribution of the sizes of the phalanges corresponds to that of a Fibonacci Sequence: from bottom to top, each unit is equivalent to the sum of the two previous ones.

Once we have drawn the bones of the first finger, we will continue with the others, always remembering to adapt the size of each metacarpal to the circle that we have prepared as a reference for the palm.

3. Drawing the thumb

The thumb, unlike the rest of the fingers, consists of only one metacarpus and two phalanges.

To draw it, we have to take into account the size of the middle finger. The last two phalanges of this finger will have the same size as the only two phalanges of the thumb, while the longest phalange of the middle finger will correspond to the size of the metacarpus of the thumb.

Knowing this, we can now draw it with the correct proportions.

4. Add the tissues, muscles and joints

Now it only remains to finalize the illustration and give life to the bones we have drawn. We have to take into account the space of the knuckles and the wrinkles they generate in the skin, the nails that occupy half of the last phalanges, the flesh of the fingers and the tissues and muscles that connect the palm of the hand with the thumb.

And now we know how to draw an anatomically correct hand! We just need to practice again and again to be able to do it by heart.

And if you liked this tutorial, remember that you can learn with Zursoif the basics to draw the human body without a model in his online course 'Anatomical drawing for beginners'.

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