6 / 17
Aug 2020

How did you all mangage to get past the hands stage of drawing?!?!?!?!?! I can't even do bodies...I can only do heads....Becoming an artist is very hard, but I'm pushing forward, so any help is worth it!

I found a tutorial on how to do hands and feet, but the body and clothes...PLEASE HELP ME!!

Hands and feet tutorials if anyone needs them:

  • created

    Aug '20
  • last reply

    Aug '20
  • 16

    replies

  • 931

    views

  • 17

    users

  • 51

    likes

  • 5

    links

I'm still really bad at hands and feet, but using a quick pose generator whenever you're bored to do some sketches of references works really well too

Dunno what others do, but I know how I do it: Break down the hand into recognizable and easily memorable shapes, then really practice with those shapes. I think another important thing is not be overwhelmed with trying to learn every single angle and hand pose. A lot of hand actions look similar when you isolate them and compare.

Always draw from reference bro! It's one of the best ways to learn because every time you draw a hand on your character and you use a reference image, you're also doing a study of a hand which is gonna further those skills too! Two birds with one stone!
There's no shame in using references, even pros use reference most of the time.
Honestly though, I think the majority of artists find hands difficult, definitely including myself, so don't worry about finding them hard.
Anyway, Proko has a fantastic and in depth anatomy course FOR FREE!! So you should go and check his website and youtube channel out if you can :smiley: https://www.proko.com/library/#.Xy20R6-SnZk

Clothes.... they still give me nightmares sometimes. If you don't want to spend hours drawing folded up and/or bundled up towels and other random cloth and figuring it out yourself like I was forced to (the "brute force" method), I suggest doing a little research into cloth stiffness/thickness and how they wrinkle.

This is a pretty good place to start. It goes over both how different cloths behave when folded, and how they drape over the body :smile_01: https://www.clipstudio.net/how-to-draw/archives/1579263

Do studies and use references until you don't need them anymore (haven't reached that stage yet).

I would recommend trying at least one of two methods for study/practice: breaking the hand down into simple shapes (the usual) OR figuring out the general overall shape of the hand.

Knowing which one your artist brain gravitates to will be important for learning in the long run. If your brain prefers overall shapes but you keep feeding it structural breakdowns, you're gonna end up with a lot of stiff, lifeless, ugly-lookin hands.
And if your brain prefers structure and you feed it vague sketches, you'll just end up frustrating yourself and feeling lost whenever you need to do a new pose/gesture.

I prefer overall shapes personally, and I grew up drawing hands kinda however I saw 'em. Then I took time out to study their structure with the polygons and all that for a couple years, but after that (when I realized which technique I actually liked better) I went back to focusing on overall shapes, and now I get consistently better hands.
Both techniques were important to learn: my structural knowledge feeds the detail of the overall shapes. But you have to know which one to focus on to get the best result in the end. Some people do great with the polygons all their lives, some people need to let them go at some point in order to get the most out of the skill they've acquired.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there's no quick or easy button for drawing, you just have to do it over and over and over and over, stop and cry for a little bit, and then keep drawing some more, lol. When people say you have to practice and draw all the time, that's pretty much all there is to it. Eventually things will click. Use a lot of real reference from everyone you can, and practice. Use your own hands, use photos, use action figures, use other artists. Use Youtube tutorials, use old and new anatomy drawing books. Get a wide variety of sources, and try different methods. Just gotta fill up them sketchbooks!

You know what do you have for drawing hands?
That's right, folks, you have hands! :doggo_shook:
I know, I know, it's a strange concept, but you will have to live with that. Look at them, make photos of them and draw them a lot. Never ever ever ever try to hide them on a drawing. Let your characters make a lot of gestures. Just drawing hands is pretty boring to me, but a character who is trying to show the fish they never catched to their friends is much more interesting way to approach this labor.
It will become better, there will be time you'll enjoy drawing them :slight_smile:

I envy all of the artists here... Every time I draw hands, it looks like popcorn.

You just draw them. A lot. Like that's really all there is to it.

I will say, there are easier and harder ways to draw hands, and there are certain positions that look hella, hella good--so it helps to do master studies off of artists who are pretty damn good at it (so take some time and copy some Mucha, Da vinci and Michealangelo--they knew how to position hands so they were as aesthetic as possible) You can also look to artists that are particularly good at doing stylized hands if that's what you're into as well--so if you're bored of drawing from life or if you have baby hands like I do (I use my hands as reference but I always have to add an inch to them when I draw) you can look up comic and commercial artists who are just...really up on their hands game.

Breaking things down into shapes mostly works for me. But hands are still a struggle for me, that's why I typically avoid it. But when in doubt, stare at it until it comes to you. That's what I do. And if it's too frustrating, take a break and come back to it.

Honestly, I learned how to draw hands (and the body in general) by studying how other artists applied fluidity.

I'm talking curves, circles, bending, flexible shapes. Even though we can have square and rectangle shapes in our bodies, humans are basically soft, squishy beings that bend and twist and just...look soft. It's a mixture of taut and loose that helps the most.

And I found that my best hand motions and body gestures were the ones that embraced both. I look at paintings done by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, but I also looked at creators like Danny Antonucci (Ed, Edd, n Eddy), Emily Carroll, and Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon).

Instead of breaking up the body into squares, I'd suggest breaking it up into lines. This first sample below kinda does just that -- showing the gestures in motion with sort of a silhouette look. I do a mixture of sharp and curved lines to show what parts of the body bends and what parts are taut with tension:

Then I do the same with the other two examples, though now, they're more detailed. Another suggestion here is to do looser drawings. Let you pen do one quick stroke, even if the poses aren't always anatomically correct:


The same can be applied to hands. I do a combination of taut and curved gestures, even a little bit of uncanniness. I might use my own hands for references and just exaggerate as I go along:

Seconding this! Even before I got good (well let's be real- okay) at drawing hands, back when I was in school I would occasionally just doodle my hands in the margins of my notebooks lol. Even now while I feel confident getting hands blocked out in an okay looking way in most drawings, I still will just quickly mimic the pose I'm trying to create to get a better sense of how the fingers curl and all that.


Feet are similar, but since they mostly hold a uniform shape I've found them consistently easier personally... Still tricky to draw but you don't have a bunch of fingers flying all over the place to worry about @u@


Bodies, everyone has their own methods. I've recently started blocking things out with geometric shapes more and more frequently in recent years- a lot of my poses lacked volume until I started doing that. They could still use work but they're closer now lol. The pro-est tip for clothes is to at least rough in the shape of the body first so that you can wrap the clothes around it instead of just trying to free-style the clohes in from wherever they start.

That's all I got for now. Good luck!

Looking at reference, whether the internet, a pose doll or yourself, helps a lot. Drawing them more helps as well since you will be ironing out the mistakes.

I always use myself as reference when I have to draw hands, feet, and body in certain positions and angles. If that doesn't work, I use Google images or JustSketchMe.

As for drawing wrinkles/folds on clothes, I watch TV and YouTube to see how clothes will look like if people do certain movements and positions. I mostly rely on my intuition when it comes to clothes though.