My life is a busy one. This is my stress relief.

(001) Awkwardly drawn hands

Her hands look to be in a very painful position, don't they? I was so preoccupied with trying to make the fingers look right that I forgot to make sure her wrists were bent at an angle that didn't induce screams of pain.

Oops.

Oh, well. It's happened before, and I don't doubt that it will happen again.

A lot of people say that hands are really hard to draw. They're not, exactly. They're comprised of lines and shapes and light and shadows, just like everything else. They're no harder to draw correctly than eyes, or knees, or noses or ears or hair. Thing is, hands are complicated.

I know that "they're not hard, they're complicated!" doesn't sound like much of an argument, but bear with me here, because it's absolutely true. Why? Because we simplify most of what we draw. Most things can be reduced pretty easily. Hair, eyes, and ears can all be simplified into something that takes only a brushstroke and a half—and they will still be recognisable. Hands, unfortunately, tend not to follow that pattern. There's only so far you can simplify a hand before it become unrecognisable—a blob, perhaps, or a couple of pen scratches gruesomely missing most fingers.

So while we simplify almost everything else into larger and simpler shapes, we still try to get details right in hands. The extra detail makes things a little awkward. Even making sure that your subject has the right number of fingers will probably mean that their hands are over twice as detailed as any other part of them.

So yeah. It gets a little awkward. And since hands are awkward to begin with, it's easy to attribute the awkwardness to the hands themselves... instead of the fact that your character's wrists are broken, or you accidently drew something completely backwards.

Yeah, that doesn't help much.