Categories: Recreation

How to Draw Anime/Manga: Hands

The tutorial was written by me. All images were hand drawn by me too. For more hand drawn tutorials like this, please visit my site.

Drawing hands, whether realistically or anime style, is one of the hardest things to accomplish. This is because the hand has infinite different positions, which means that there are infinite different positions the hand can be drawn. It is extremely hard to draw consistent natural looking hands. But just because this is a hard feat to accomplish doesn’t mean we can’t try.

One of the biggest inaccuracies beginners do is draw hands the wrong size. When most people start drawing, they usually draw hands too small. A few draw them too big, but the majority of us start off drawing hands too small. To see how big the hand is, go to a mirror and hold up your hand in front of your face. Most people will see that their hand is almost as big as their face.

So rule one when drawing hands: The hand is as big as the face.

Also:

Rule two: The fingers are as long as the palm
People draw hands differently. Some people can just draw awesome hands straight onto the paper, while others have to do guides and steps. I draw hands in two steps. Firstly I draw the palm of the hand and the placement of the joints. Each finger has three joints including the knuckle, and the thumb as two.

Another common mistake people make is that their draw all the knuckles and joints parallel. This will make your hand look block like. Using your own hand as your reference, you can see that if you draw a line through all your joints, they form an arch. But of course you can position them so they do become parallel… The hand has infinite different positions, remember?

So rule three: The joints and knuckles are not usually parallel. They form an arch.

If you like to draw action scenes, angry people or just like to draw people bashing the crap out of each other, then fists are an essential. The best way to draw the fist, or any hand positioin in fact, is to use your space hand as a reference.

In the first example you can see the basic guides I draw to start it off. I draw the palm/back of the hand as well as the knuckles. One of the most common mistakes that people make when drawing fists that makes their fists look unnatural, is that they forget to draw the thumb’s knuckle, also called the big knuckle. In the examples below you can see that each fist always includes the big knuckle. I have quite bony hands, so my big knuckle is quite prominent.

So remember Rule Four: Always draw the thumb’s big knuckle.

Remembering those four rules will hopefully help you draw better, more natural looking hands. So:

Rule one: The hand is as big as the face

Rule two: The fingers are as long as the palm

Rule three: The joints and knuckles usually form an arch.

Rule four: Always draw the thumb’s big knuckle.

Drawing hands takes practice and determination. No matter how bad you are, and I was pretty bad to be honest, the more you practice, the easier it will be to draw better hands. Even copying from Anime shows or Manga Books will help you. It’s all about the practice. Also using your spare hand, or even the hand you’re drawing with (if you’re trying to draw someone holding a pencil), as a reference is extremely helpful.

You know, I was thinking (always a dangerous thing to do), I reckon artists were the one who invented pockets, so that they didn’t have to draw hands.

I have posted a few examples of the infinite positions you can draw hands. Note that I didn’t spend hours and hours trying to get them right, you just have to draw them til they look decent enough to be believable.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this tutorial on how to draw hands and learned something helpful. Remember, and this especially applies when drawing hands, practice makes perfect! Bye for now.