Drawing hands can be hard, harder than any other part of a character except for a realistic ear or biology book abdomen cutaway. For those whose aim is visual storytelling over artistic rendering, hands are something we try to hide, or cover in mittens.
Luckily for those whose primary goal is storytelling through drawing and not the drawing itself there are only a half dozen hand poses you need to know or memorize. Unluckily for you, figuring out where the thumb goes is easier than you think and then harder than you thought. Thumb position depend on whether your drawing is supposed to looking at a character or of a character looking at their own hands, further it depends on if the hand is palm up or palm down, even further it depends if that pam is held in the high five or the low five position.
Okay, back to the being lucky part. Prompt & Pencil developed an ever expanding Cartoon Hand Reference to help you quickly draw hands and place them on the correct side of the character. You can simply refer to it, or import it into Photoshop or Procreate and tace over to get the rough structure before finishing it off in your own style. Trace enough hands and you’ll soon be able to crank out the few positions necessary to tell a visual story.
