Hey, you guys got any pointers or tricks for drawing intertwined fingers? Ya know, the kind where you fold your hands together and put them on the table/your chest as you listen to someone talking or are deep in thought.

First thing to start off with is drawing hands in general! To make this easier, I want to explain how I personally break down hands:

Drawing floppy and stretchy hands is great, but if you’re going for realism, try to remember the building blocks - the hand is made of basic shapes. The palm can be represented by a box, and I like to think of the fingers as cylinders.

Now, given that, here comes the absolute most pivotal piece of advice I can ever give:

I don’t know if you already have one or not, but if you don’t - PLEASE DO! Always try to draw with a reference if it’s a pose you’re unfamiliar with. It will help immensely, and it’s not cheating!

Now, looking at this reference, we can already go over some common mistakes people make when drawing interlaced fingers of any kind. 

The most common thing I see is people drawing the palms parallel and then forcing the fingers to twist around one another instead of allowing them to rest with one lower and one higher so the fingers slot naturally.

Next, let’s explore some varying ways of building your hands. For this, we will be using the same hands-laying-on-table model as the reference photo above. 

I have two common ways of drawing these types of complex hand positions - one of them is the more constructive approach where I study my reference, even trace over it to get an idea of how the shapes function - and then I go in and try to recreate that by building the shapes back together.

As you can see, I literally start with the palms and draw each finger in, trying to imagine how it would fit as a 3 dimensional object, and how much give the skin has and how they bend around each other.

However, this method is a bit long-winded and involved, so I have another option for you, which is my cheat for when I just want to plan something believable:

This option is quite literally called ‘the squiggle’ (or sqwiggle) because I just draw a squiggle with 4 turns on each side and then use that as a guide to draw in the fingers. 

This method works, but of course it also has to be adjusted later on - I can’t approximate good finger rations with a squiggle, so I sort out things like finger length and palm position later, when I do lineart.

There are probably other ways of doing it - but these two are my personal favorites! Of course, there are other perspectives to consider, but I think the first rule applies here: Get a reference photo! Everything else will follow. :)

- Mod Chekhov ( @thechekhov )

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