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Description
Drawing hands is hard! Here’s how I approach them - hopefully people find this helpful!

1. Draw a basic "elongated trapezoid" shape at the end of the arm. This is the main bulk of the hand - in other words, everything but the fingers. It doesn't have to be perfect!

2. Draw some basic lines where you want the fingers to go.

3. Flesh out the shape of the fingers. You can do this either by using your guidelines as one side of your final lineart (seen in the pinky, ring, and middle fingers here) or by using those lines as a center marker (seen in the index finger and thumb here).

4. Clean up the lines you have so you can see how the hand is looking so far.

5. Your first pass probably wasn't perfect. That’s okay - now it’s time to modify the shape a bit to make it more realistic. Tweak things until you're satisfied; now is also usually the point when I add details like knuckles (but not fingernails - those come last).
-Here, I made the fingers a bit thicker and lumpier, thickened the wrist and modified its connection point with the thumb for a smoother look, and added an indicator of where the pinky is behind the index finger.

5. Once your lineart is done, you can color it, shade it, leave it un-colored - whatever you want to do! This is also the stage where I add fingernails.
-I sometimes erase the knuckle lines after I’ve shaded them, but not every art style allows for this. Do what works best for you!
-I do the nails last, after the hand is all colored and shaded. Usually, I use a low-opacity version of the highlight tone for that.
-Darker-skinned folks usually have lighter palms and nail beds. Use a clipping mask and a soft brush to modify the lineart so it goes better with the lighter color.*
-If there’s some sort of gradient in the base color, I use a blending effect on the shade layer and sometimes change the opacity. For this drawing, I took the base shadow tone and used the multiply setting with the layer at 30% opacity, but I still had to fiddle with the base color a bit, resulting in this warmer tone being the actual shadow color.

*Coloring dark skin is something I’m still learning how to do, and since my own skin is extremely pale I can’t exactly use my own hands as a reference, so maybe take this part with a grain of salt. For a more detailed guide on how to color dark skin, I personally recommend this tumblr post - it’s very straightforward and I personally find it really helpful!

Description
Drawing hands is hard! Here’s how I approach them - hopefully people find this helpful!

1. Draw a basic "elongated trapezoid" shape at the end of the arm. This is the main bulk of the hand - in other words, everything but the fingers. It doesn't have to be perfect!

2. Draw some basic lines where you want the fingers to go.

3. Flesh out the shape of the fingers. You can do this either by using your guidelines as one side of your final lineart (seen in the pinky, ring, and middle fingers here) or by using those lines as a center marker (seen in the index finger and thumb here).

4. Clean up the lines you have so you can see how the hand is looking so far.

5. Your first pass probably wasn't perfect. That’s okay - now it’s time to modify the shape a bit to make it more realistic. Tweak things until you're satisfied; now is also usually the point when I add details like knuckles (but not fingernails - those come last).
-Here, I made the fingers a bit thicker and lumpier, thickened the wrist and modified its connection point with the thumb for a smoother look, and added an indicator of where the pinky is behind the index finger.

5. Once your lineart is done, you can color it, shade it, leave it un-colored - whatever you want to do! This is also the stage where I add fingernails.
-I sometimes erase the knuckle lines after I’ve shaded them, but not every art style allows for this. Do what works best for you!
-I do the nails last, after the hand is all colored and shaded. Usually, I use a low-opacity version of the highlight tone for that.
-Darker-skinned folks usually have lighter palms and nail beds. Use a clipping mask and a soft brush to modify the lineart so it goes better with the lighter color.*
-If there’s some sort of gradient in the base color, I use a blending effect on the shade layer and sometimes change the opacity. For this drawing, I took the base shadow tone and used the multiply setting with the layer at 30% opacity, but I still had to fiddle with the base color a bit, resulting in this warmer tone being the actual shadow color.

*Coloring dark skin is something I’m still learning how to do, and since my own skin is extremely pale I can’t exactly use my own hands as a reference, so maybe take this part with a grain of salt. For a more detailed guide on how to color dark skin, I personally recommend this tumblr post - it’s very straightforward and I personally find it really helpful!