How to Draw Hands on a Cartoon Character

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Danny Page, and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. In this series, I'm going to teach you how to draw basic cartoon characters. All right; next up on our character; hands. Sadly to say; people are often intimidated by drawing hands, and often times they will attempt to cop out of having to do it; by putting their characters in a situation where they don't necessarily have to show their hands; by hiding them in pockets, and things like that. We're not going to shy away from that, and you really shouldn't have to feel intimidated by hands. What we're going to do is just give our character here the basic cartoon hand look. Now; just be very careful as you're crafting these hands; start with the thumb, and work your way out. We're going to give this guy a standard wave, so we started with the thumb; kind of gave it a little bit of an indent here; then we're going to build off of that. Just go over the hands like you would; very careful detail. We're giving this character a more realistic look, so most animators would stop with the typical four fingered hand. You see that on most Disney cartoon characters, and the old school, and a lot of cartoons in general. I don't know why they do this, to me; it seems kind of silly, and so, for us; we're going to give this guy a full fingered hand, and give him a bit of a palm there. So there he is; waving. I guess hands can get a little bit complicated; depending on what kind of a pose you do. Over here; we can show what a hand with a fist might look like. Instead; you might come inside to ball up the hand, and bring the thumb across the palm, and get the fingers all nice and wrapped up; for a punch or something like that. You see what I'm saying? There are lots of different options; as far as hands go, and you worry about the hand on a case by case basis; depending on what the character is doing in a particular drawing. Our character is introducing himself, so he's going to be waving. A cheesy little bit, but what are you going to do; it's my drawing; deal. All right; moving on."