Like facial expressions, hands have a way of expressing moods, such as threatening with a clenched fist or vulnerable with an open palm.
The hand is made up of bones, muscles and tendons. Observing the way the fingers, knuckles and wrist work together will increase your ability to draw these features of the human body. The wrist and knuckles, shown with an oval and circles, allow flexibility. The bones of the wrist are in the lower portion of the hand, connecting the bones of the hand to the bones of the arm.
The finger bone lengths reduce proportionally as they go outward. The thumb has one less bone than the other fingers, thus has one less knuckle. When examined as groupings, the bones and knuckles are not straight across, but line up as curves, with the curves more pronounced as they go outward. The fingernail cuticle begins halfway between the knuckle and the fingertip.
The length of the hand is equal to the distance of the chin to the upper forehead. The distance of the wrist to the tip of the thumb is equal to about half the head height.
The hand makes up more than a third of the distance of the forearm from the elbow to the fingertips.
Some hands tend to be bulky and bony whereas others are more slender and graceful. Besides the bones and muscles, tendons, veins and arteries also influence the visible form of the hand. These features can be made more noticeable by adding values.
Hands can be blocked in by sketching the rows of knuckles with curved lines. Note that knuckles do not naturally line up in straight lines.
To make a drawing easier, it is common to see hands with fingers that are grouped together. Simple drawings of hands like this show the hand as an outline without lines separating the grouped fingers.
When flattened and viewed from the side, the hand tapers from the wrist to the fingertips.