Fist Tutorial. Drawing the Fist From a Front POV

[Bruce Lee]

Like most of the human anatomy, drawing a human hand can be pretty tough sometimes. Many people find it difficult to draw hands made into a fist. As a follow-up tutorial to my "DRAWING A FIST FROM THE SIDE VIEW", here's a step-by-step walking you through some of the though processes involved in drawing a fist as seen from a straight-on, front POV. Let's get started:

To draw a fist from the front, you must consider the shape of a fist and actual hand anatomy. The finger bones in a human hand are called Phalanges, and these are divided up into three sections. These areas are:

1) Distal Phalanges--These are the finger bones located furthest from the shoulder joint that run from your finger tips to the knuckle that is furthest from the shoulder of the arm.

2) Intermediate or "Medial" Phalanges--These are finger bones that lie in the middle of the fingers between the two finger joints.

3) Proximal Phalanges--These are bones that form the base of your fingers. These are the stoutest finger bones and are knobby at their ends. This knobby area is more commonly known as the knuckles. It is primarily the Proximal Phalanges that we will be most concerned with in this tutorial, as the Proximals make up the majority of the human fist when seen a front POV.

FIGURE 1. To start with, let's make a rectangular shape. It's important to draw this shape lightly with your pencil, keeping in mind that what we'll begin with is the geometric framework of the fist. This will be the "under drawing", so don't pencil this in too dark. You'll be erasing things later.

I've chosen to tilt the rectangular shape here, but you don't have to do that. Basically, you want the rectangle to run horizontally across the paper, with the tops and bottoms of the box being about twice the length as the sides like this:



We are creating the basic rectangular shape of the Proximal Phalanges here.



FIGURE 2. If you take a good look at the human fist from the front, you'll notice that the shape isn't exactly a rectangle. The top of the Proximal bones form small peaks at the top of the fist. These are of course, your knuckles. You'll notice that the highest knuckle peak is right above your middle finger. In this second step, we'll be putting down the framework for the knuckles. At the top of the rectangle we now need to lightly draw in the apex of the middle finger's knuckle. Notice that this knuckle-peak is off center, as the middle finger would be on a fist. The height of the peak should be about 1/3 the distance of the sides of your rectangle. Be careful not to make it too high, because it's important to get the proportions correct. When it comes to credible human anatomy, proportions count!





FIGURE 3. A fist wouldn't really look very credible if we didn't have a thumb bent beneath it, would it? Starting at the bottom right corner of the rectangle, draw in a small trapezoid shape (See figure below). The top and bottom lines of the trapezoid shape should be parallel, but you'll notice that the sides aren't. Don't worry--this is still just the framework of the drawing, so you won't have to get this exact. You'll be changing things up later, so just get this as close as you can for now. At this point, you should end up with a something that looks similar to this:

[Bruce Lee]

FIGURE 4. Now things get a little trickier as we'll begin to lightly pencil in the divisions of the fingers, and we'll refine our thumb just a bit.

The thumb: This will only be a minor tweak. You'll simply be retracing your steps from the lower right corner. The only difference is that once your thumb outline touches against the bottom of your rectangle, you'll begin the top part of the trapezoid earlier, making it the top of the thumb. You will not be closing the top of the trapezoid this time (see figure 4).

Dividing the fingers: The fingers are pretty similar to one another, but the pointer finger and middle finger tend to be slightly wider than the other two. When you close your fingers and make a fist, you'l probably notice that the bottom ends of the Proximal bones tend to jut outward a little more than the top Proximal ends (knuckles). The middle finger tends to jut out in front of the other fingers as well. This varies from person to person, but generally the middle finger does protrude outward a bit more than the others. Because of this, we'll need to compensate some in the drawing. How will we do this? We begin by dividing up the four fingers via a series of vertical lines that start from the bottom of our original rectangle. We won't make these lines completely vertical. We'll be giving them a little slant (or lean)to compensate for the way the bottom of the Proximal bones protrude forward. These slanting vertical lines should rise upward to about three-quarters of height of our rectangle (see figure 4).

Note below (figure 4) that we have done something a little different with the dividing line between the ring finger and middle finger. Starting from the base of the rectangle I have chosen to slant the division line the oppose way at first. Then, only a short distance away from the rectangle's base, I reverse the direction of the slant, leaning it more like the other two finger division lines. When you're done with this line, you should have a shape that is not unlike a hockey stick shape. I should note that the tilt of this vertical line is a little more dramatic and steep.





FIGURE 5: By now you should be seeing a fist emerging from the framework. We have only a few steps to go at this point. We now will need to draw in the base of the palm as it connects up with the thumb below our rectangle. Then there will be some folding skin on the outside of the palm, just beyond the pinky finger to address. These areas won't need to be exact, and for now, basic shapes similar to those below will work as good guide lines:



FIGURE 6: Okay, your framework guidelines are down. Now what's left is to round out the fingers, and indicate the knobby shapes of the knuckles. Just remember that the middle finger's knuckle has the highest pinnacle, and don't overdo the shape of the dipping curves between knuckles.

You can now start drawing with a darker and more permanent pencil line. You should now be able to use your own hand as a model to fill in the necessary details. Just remember that human fingers aren't square. Flesh covers bones and ligaments forming rounded areas, and these rounded shapes are important in drawing credible looking
fist!

[Bruce Lee]

Figure 7: Once you've rounded out the fingers and added in the knuckles, you can now remover your more lightly pencilled framework lines. Hopefully your results will look something like this:



Add in some finger nail and knuckle wrinkle details, and you should be good to go!

Remember, practicing drawing hands, fists, faces, etc really does help you grow as an artist. Don't be afraid to use reference or to have someone pose for you. It pays to learn to draw from the real world first before you start pulling things out from your head. Keep practicing and keep sketching.



Loston

[NickRocks]

heres my attempt, teacher! done at work (along with the other sketches)

[Bruce Lee]

Not bad, Nickguy, but I think you need to work on the knuckles a little. They look too even in terms of height.

And please--knock off the "teacher" stuff, eh? This is just a simple tutorial. I enjoy sharing information when I can, and I'm glad if any of it proves helpful, but I'm not an art instructor.

Loston

[NickRocks]

ok no problem. sorry if i upset you i was kidding around.

[Bruce Lee]

ok no problem. sorry if i upset you i was kidding around.

I'm not upset, man, so no worries there. I just don't want the idea behind these tutorials to be in anyway misconstrued. Even though this subforum is a showcase for me and my work, I don't want this to become a situation where it's perceived that I am lording over others. That's not what these tutorials are about, and that's not what any thread on this board is about. People have asked me for help in the past and have found my tutorials to be helpful, so I'm sharing some information, and I'm happy to do so, but I'd like to leave it at that.

There have been requests for more tutorials, and I'm trying to oblige with some new stuff. I've asked for specific requests so that I won't be wasting my time or anyones else's. In the future I'd like to avoid doing too many tutorials like this one though, because drawing a fist is info you should be able to get from any decent How-To artbook. I did this one just to balance out the other "drawing the fist" tutorial.

Loston

[jeremy dale]

:cough: Hand-drawn sound effects tutorial. Make it so.


- jeremy

[NickRocks]

im still waiting for shiny surfaces and how to render rocks/rubble/mountains

[spidey976]

So what do you have against teachers ... EH Loston ... lol. hee hee sorry dude couldn't resist.

Awesome tutorial m8 ... printed and saved for reference ... .

P.S. in older times teachers were just those who knew more about certain subjects ... and then passed that knowledge on ... ... again I couldn't resist ...lol