Tag Archives: how to draw people

How to Draw Hands for Character Design and Illustration

So you want to draw hands for your character illustrations and… Dang! It’s hard. But there are easy ways to look at a difficult problem.

Creating characters is not about accurate life drawing as a serious Artist – (capital A!).

Many characters only ever need one or two hand-shapes for a whole book or series. Practice those hands and you can soon be drawing them easily.

Even more complicated characters only ever need a small library of hand positions, so concentrate on learning those.

rashidrafsan6117  asked me – “can you make a video about drawing hands and heads.. I really love your art style.. I am struggling to come up with new character ideas and drawing hands.”

Hands are notoriously difficult to draw. They are so versatile, can take up an infinite number of positions and can be viewed from every angle too.

You really need to study hands and draw lots of them, but take heart. Characters are not primarily about art but about telling a story. Make that compelling and you can “get away” with learning to draw only a few hand positions and then learn new ones if you absolutely have to.

In this video I discuss hands drawn by great children’s book illustrators and then show basic hand construction and how you can learn to draw your own hands quite quickly.

There are amazon links to the books below. I get an affiliate fee, but you pay no more.

00:01:11 Little Horrors https://amzn.to/3Hjt0Oq

00:01:30 Literary Life https://amzn.to/47CUcm2

00:02:01 Julius Baby of the World https://amzn.to/3vGyEaQ

00:02:28 Cat in the hat https://amzn.to/3tV00JK 00:03:20 Dorothy’s Dream. https://amzn.to/3HndJvV

00:03:44 The Man who wore all his clothes. https://amzn.to/3TYxj9n

00:04:12 Eat your Peas. https://amzn.to/3U4kJFM

00:04:45 The house that Jack built https://amzn.to/3U43DaR 00:06:06 Flower Fairies. https://amzn.to/47CtgCL

Draw action poses from simple stick figures – Here’s how for all artists

Every masterpiece begins with a stick figure drawing.

Real artists, yes even the really great ones, work out their art with thumbnail drawings and stick figure sketches – often on the backs of envelopes or paper napkins in restaurants.

To draw a stick figure is easy. To draw an action stick figure needs a little more work.

With a bit of practice you’ll learn how the body moves so you’ll be able to draw anything you like from any angle.

Luckily we can use photographs to help us work things out. In this video, Shoo goes through the process and shows you how to draw your own action stick figures. Why not draw along?

You’ll find the photo of Rod Laver here:

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