Hands

LAURA SMITH continues her new four-part series, which encourages you to draw elements of old master paintings, and this month’s focus is on capturing hands

- LAURA SMITH

One wailing cry or categorical statement meets my ears time and time again from students: “I can’t do hands”. Many of us get so frustrated by what we consider to be our own inadequacy at drawing hands that we resort to the vaguest mitten-like suggestions in our pictures – or we specifically choose a head-and-shoulders composition to avoid them altogether. I know how it feels, I’ve been there.

Hands really are far more complex than we give them credit for. We are so familiar with hands, especially our own, that we forget how miraculously multifunctional they are. Imagine you were drawing in a life room and there were two models who both had four legs and one arm each. Not only that, but they kept running up to each other and entangling their many legs or falling back with their feet in the air. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? However, this is exactly the kind of challenge we are dealing with when we try to depict someone’s hands.

Hands are small, intricate, complex body parts and they really do demand a degree of concentration and subtlety beyond almost any other part of a human being. An ordinary human hand includes 27 bones, 27 joints, 34 muscles and more than 100 ligaments and tendons, as well as myriad blood vessels and nerves. It’s no wonder we all struggle.