It’s been a while — it’s time for another tutorial on figure-drawing — more about hand gestures this time. This will relate to what I talked about in the earlier posts Drawing Hands, Part V and Part II.

We’re going to look at the hand doing a holding, or a beseeching, gesture. We’re going to look at it from the thumb side. First the basic bones:

Holding gesture 1: bones

The two main points about proportions here are 1) the first bone of the thumb is about half the length of the first metacarpal (the base finger bones):

Holding gesture 2: proportions

And 2) the length of the middle finger is about the same as the distance from the joint between the ulna/radius and the wrist block (carpals) to the knuckles.

Holding gesture 2: proportions

Now we put the meat on. First, from this angle, we can see how the base of the thumb is fleshed out by the Mound of Venus:

Holding Gesture: Mound of Venus

Next — and this is the most important part of all this — we look at how the contour of the palm, seen on edge like this, is shaped by the way the palm folds at the knuckles. Here’s an image from an earlier tutorial (Drawing Hands: Thumb and Palm). This shows how the palm folds at the knuckles, as seen from the palm side:

Form of Palm IV

From the thumb side, we see a contour with two creases in it:

Holding Gesture: the folding of the palm

The first crease is at the folding of the palm at the knuckles:

Gesture of Holding: Palm folds at knuckles

The second crease is at the end of the palm, halfway between knuckles and the first joint of the fingers:

Gesture of Holding: Where the palm ends

The next time I do this, I’ll go over the same gesture, but seen from the little finger side.