BODY PARTS

BODY PARTS

This arc shape is what helps create a well-balanced and well-designed hand. It also helps you see the hand as an entire unit rather than as individual fingers. Without the balance of an arc, the hand you draw looks awkward and poorly contrived no matter how photo-realistic it is.

Although I use the cylinder as a basis to draw the hands up-close, cones are an excellent way to describe fingers tapering off when you’re drawing hands from a distance. Cones are especially useful when drawing the fingers of the female hands (especially elongated fingers that have long fingernails). I use the cone shape frequently when drawing from and away from a live model. The concept reminds me of those elongated fingers that you can see in classic figure paintings from the Mannerism Period.
 Now try your hand at drawing the fingers. For the following steps, you need to complete the palm of the hand that I show you in the previous section. Use it as your starting point to draw the fingers:
  The bottom of the thumb and the top of section A are the same width. Draw the right side of the thumb, which faces the other fingers, by extending the diagonal line ofthe right side of section A up and away from the fingers. The outer side of the thumb, which faces away from the fingers, should angle slightly inward.
  To approximate the distance between the four arcs, divide the tallest finger (the middle one) into equal thirds. Doing so yields four arcs from the palm up to the tip top of the fingers. Use this equal spacing to create arcs that cross over the other fingers (and thumb).
  The arcs for the four fingernails are at the midpoint of the top finger joint. The only exception is the base of the thumbnail, which aligns with the midpoint of the third finger joints. Snapping the hands into the forearms After you’re comfortable drawing the palm and the fingers together, snap them into the forearms that I describe earlier in this chapter. In Figure 9-19a, I fit in a sphere for each wrist. Make sure the spheres fit securely without any gaps between the openings at the bot- toms of the forearms. Then position the hands as shown in Figure 9-19b.
The wrist aligns slightly above line E. To draw the simplified version of the hand for the stick figure, I recommend using the banana shape method where the backside of the hand curves toward the body and loops back up to connect at the wrist. The resulting shape from the front view resembles a banana with the top 1/3 sliced off.
Figure 9-19: Fitting the hands into the fore- arms of your mannequin. ab
 The top plane of each hand rests flush with the forearm while the bottom side of the hand protrudes slightly outside the wrist.
Checking out the side views of the hand You can draw two side views for the hand (in both views you see an uneven rectangle in which the top or wrist end is raised slightly higher than the finger side):
 To accommodate section A of the palm, which naturally drops slightly below the rest of the fingers in a relaxed position, I tack on a second rectangle.
  If the concept of this second rectangle confuses you, observe in the mirror the way your thumb rests when you hold it to the side. The rectangle for section A is approxi- mately half the length of the palm and should vertically dip down to half the height of the side view of the palm.
  Here are some key points to keep in mind when drawing this position:
 • The length of the palm is the same as the length of the middle finger. Measure from the base of the wrist to the spot where the top of the palm connects with the index finger; use this measurement to draw the middle finger.
 • The distance between the base of the wrist and the base of the thumb is the same length as the thumb (from base to tip). In addition, the distance between the tip of the thumb and the tip of the index finger is the same as the length of the thumb