Ah yes, hands are notoriously difficult to draw. I’ll do what I can to help!
First off, below is a diagram of how I usually invision the shapes that make up the hand. Proportion-wise, the longest finger is usually just a little bit shorter than the palm (though this can vary from person to person).
Here’s the hand again, in a different position. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of the segments of the finger as box-like shapes, rather than cylinders.
Here’s a breakdown of my usual process while drawing hands:
Honestly, while I know it’s not the answer anyone wants to hear, the things that will help more than anything else are lots of practice and using references. On the plus side, the good thing about hands is that references are easy to find! Besides looking at your own hands for reference (which I definitely recommend), you can also look up images online. The website Pixlovely even has a drawing practice tool specifically for hands.
Okay, I will be going into more detail about the various parts of the body later, but this seemed like a good opportunity to start off with an overview.
In drawing, it is generally better to start with basic shapes, before jumping right into doing all the details. That’s why many artists use a skeleton or mannequin of sorts to lay out the general shape of the body before they start on the face, hair, clothing, and so on. Different artist’s mannequins tend to look a little different, and I don’t think there’s one “right” way to do it, but here’s what mine look like:
At this early stage in a drawing, the most important things are the pose and the proportions. I’ll talk about posing in a later post, but here are my thoughts about proportions:
When talking about proportions, we often measure in “heads” – that is, the height of the head of the person being measured. The average adult human is roughly seven and a half heads tall, although there is some variation in real life (and even more variation in stylized art!).
Characters with larger heads in proportion to their bodies (in other words, characters who are fewer heads tall) tend to look younger and/or cuter (hence, chibis).
Conversely, characters with a smaller head in proportion to their bodies (characters who are more heads tall) tend to look powerful or imposing. You’ll see this a lot with superheroes and villains and other “larger-than-life” characters.
Keeping the various parts of the body in proportion to each other can be a challenge. Here are some of the rules-of-thumb I use to help keep things from getting too wonky:
The legs are roughly half the total height
Elbows fall at or just below the bottom of the rib cage
Wrists are even with the crotch
The length of the hand, from the heel of the palm to the tip of the longest finger, is roughly equal to the height of the face, from chin to hairline
Okay, finally getting around to those art questions (sorry for the wait!). Keep in mind, my word is not absolute – being an artist is a constant state of learning, and that applies to me too! But I’m happy to share my thoughts, and link to other resources if I think they may be helpful 🙂
The first question is about dragons:
When drawing dragons, I usually start with a blocky wedge shape as the basis of the head. This helps with visualizing the head in perspective.
(I’ve seen other artists use different shapes for this – it comes down to personal preference, really.)
Altering the initial shape of wedge and the placement of the facial features within it can help you create different head shapes for your dragons:
One of the tricky things about the ¾ view in particular is trying to keep the face symmetrical as the head turns. This is one of the reasons I find the wedge helpful as a guideline. In the example below, this dragon’s eye falls halfway between the front and back of the box in the sideview. Drawing a halfway line on the box in perspective helps place the eyes in the ¾ view.
Oh man there’s a lot, most of which you’ll be able to learn from any good scriptwriting workshop or book, but personally I would say the most important thing to remember is that (unless you’re hiring an artist), YOU will be the one drawing it all out eventually, so you really, really have to make something that excites you in some way.
Comics take a long time to make. Something that takes a paragraph to convey in prose can take an entire page. A background detail that could be said with one written sentence and then carried in the reader’s visual memory actually has to be drawn out, repeatedly, from multiple different angles. You’ll most likely draw the same faces, over and over, potentially for many years depending on the length of your project.
This isn’t to put you off! I believe the payoff is absolutely worth it – visual storytelling brings another entire level and even though it can be a tough road, having the ability to speak with more than words is extremely beautiful and cool imo.
I guess it’s kind of a waffly way to say: make sure whatever you’re making excites you in some way!! That doesn’t mean it needs to be super thrilling page-turning adventure or a murder mystery. There are many ways you could make a comic project exciting for yourself:
Research scenery that you love and use it for settings
Use an experimental art style
Challenge and push yourself with framing, layout, visual storytelling
Spend a lot of time with your characters outside the story, learn about them
Figure out what’s important to you, and how you could convey that to readers
Figure out what the POINT of your comic is. It doesn’t have to be a huge moral thesis, but for example if the point is just to show a peaceful slice of life, remember that
Think about why you were excited about the story in the first place
Because they are SUCH long term projects, a lot of comic writers/makers will have some times where they aren’t excited by their creation as much and that’s pretty natural. But you can try to keep it as fresh and exciting as possible, and while writing think about what you’re going to enjoy drawing later.
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