# Beginner Figure Drawing - How to Draw Hands - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/beginner-figure-drawing-how-to-draw-hands/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 7 /10 # Beginner Figure Drawing - How to Draw Hands Updated August 2026 JW Learning · Drawing the Body, Head and Hands All levels · 100 min A methodical hand-construction breakdown that beats most figure-drawing courses on this specific body part, but the 25-minute timed session is barely narrated. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbeginner-figure-drawing-how-to-draw-hands%2F1443173908) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. This is a hand-drawing course that treats its subject the way an anatomy textbook would: not as a shape to copy, but as a small system of interlocking parts that has to be understood before it can be drawn convincingly. The teacher opens by naming the two ideas that run through the whole lesson, construction and gesture, and then spends the bulk of the runtime working through construction zone by zone: wrist, back of the hand, fingers, thumb, and the webbing that connects the thumb to everything else. ## What the construction lessons actually teach The finger breakdown is the most rigorous part of the course. Each finger is treated as three tapered cylinder segments, with specific fractional proportions given for where each joint falls, plus a rule of thumb (fingers should always be drawn slightly longer than measured, never shorter). It goes further than most construction tutorials by adding the small details that make a hand read as alive rather than mechanical: knuckle balls, the tendon that runs from mid-finger back into the hand, and what the course calls "3.5 pads" of soft tissue cushioning each segment. The thumb gets its own dedicated lesson because it behaves so differently from the fingers, sitting at a lower resting angle, rotated roughly 45 degrees from the other digits, and wrapped in a distinct teardrop-shaped webbing that stretches from the wrist to the index knuckle. One genuinely useful idea threaded through several lessons is the use of built-in landmarks for solving perspective problems: the curve of a fingernail, the crease pattern at a knuckle, even the printed ring around a pencil can all be read as cross-contour guides when a pose gets confusing. This is a practical trick that most beginner-level tutorials skip in favor of just saying "study foreshortening," and it is the part of the course most likely to stick with a viewer after the fact. ## Where it thins out The demonstration lessons follow the same construction logic in real time, walking through a full hand, the back of a hand, an isolated finger, and an isolated thumb, and they're useful for seeing the boxes-then-cylinders workflow applied rather than just described. But the 25-minute timed exercise session itself offers almost no spoken instruction, just the sound of drawing, before the follow-up demonstration lesson explains the choices after the fact. Anyone hoping to draw along with real-time guidance during that stretch will be working in silence. The course also assumes a fair amount of prior grounding. It repeatedly references an earlier lesson in the series for basic gesture and construction concepts and does not re-teach them from scratch, so a viewer with zero background in construction drawing will likely feel like they've walked into the middle of a conversation. The underlying bone and muscle structure of the hand is explicitly set aside for a future, more advanced lesson, which is a reasonable scope decision but means this course stays entirely at the surface-form level. What it delivers well is a genuinely thorough vocabulary for talking about and building a hand: five named parts, clear proportional rules, and a repeatable box-to-cylinder workflow that transfers across poses. For an artist who already has basic figure construction under their belt and specifically wants to stop dreading hands, the depth here is worth the 100 minutes. The standout The lesson on reading fingernail curvature and knuckle creases as built-in directional markers for solving foreshortening and overlap is the single most transferable problem-solving tool in the course. ## What you will learn - · Break the hand into five construction zones: wrist, back of hand, fingers, thumb, and the thumb's webbing - · Build fingers as three tapered cylinder segments with knuckle balls, tendons, and 3.5 pads per digit - · Locate the thumb's teardrop-shaped webbing and its lower, rotated resting position relative to the palm - · Use natural landmarks like fingernail curvature and knuckle creases to nail perspective and foreshortening - · Distinguish masculine versus feminine and older versus younger hand construction through squared-off versus rounded forms - · Apply a start-big-then-refine workflow that separates construction, gesture, and rendering passes Best for: An artist who already understands basic gesture and construction from an earlier lesson in this series and specifically wants a deep, structural breakdown of hand anatomy. Skip it if: A complete beginner with no prior construction or gesture vocabulary, or anyone hoping for guided narration during the actual timed practice exercises. Helpful Examples Organization of Lessons Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbeginner-figure-drawing-how-to-draw-hands%2F1443173908)