Hands are every painter’s nightmare. Too many tiny things to get perfectly right—it feels impossible and people can immediately spot when it looks goofy. Practice makes perfect, so this week we practice painting hands. With a structured approach, you can actually enjoy painting them (yes, really).

Let’s break it down into a few steps that simplify the process while keeping your work realistic.

How to Paint Hands Without Losing Your Mind

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See What the Hand is Doing

The first trap most beginners fall into is diving straight into the fingers. That’s a shortcut to frustration. Instead, start by squinting and seeing the big block of the hand. The palm is the “base,” and the fingers are extensions. Think of it as one solid volume before anything else.

Most importantly, understand what the hand is doing and what it trying to point to. Sometimes, the actual position of the hand on your reference is not the best one and you have to tweak the position of the fingers to make it look more aesthetic. Hands have an annoying tendency to take unflattering positions.

Busy hands are beautiful hands : understand what the hand is trying to achieve and you can connect it to it’s most flattering position.

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Understand Foreshortening

The real challenge with hands isn’t the fingers—it’s foreshortening. Fingers often point toward or away from the viewer, which means their true length gets visually compressed. If you don’t account for this, hands instantly look awkward or wrong.

The solution is to think in terms of planes and cross-sections. Picture the top plane of a finger as it angles toward you—it gets shorter, but the knuckles, overlaps, and shadow shapes give cues to its depth : represent it by drawing the cross section. Train your eye to measure not just lengths but angles and overlaps. That’s where realism comes from.

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Simplify the Shadows

Hands are full of tiny details—wrinkles, veins, highlights. But you don’t need to paint every pore. Instead, focus on shadow shapes. Place them carefully, and they’ll carve out the structure for you. The contrast between light and shadow does most of the heavy lifting.

Do not use dark line to separate the different planes and don’t exaggerate the folds with dark lines. Let shadows and the various value planes do the modeling, don’t draw lines with paint, it ruins teh realism.

Understand the volume of the hand as if it was a portrait, where does the light comes from, what part of the hand is facing the light source, what part is turning away from it, how much?...

Start with a simple 3 shadow value map and progressively refine but only if the realism is working. If not, then go back to the simplified value map. Most of the time, simple values will do the job.

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Details Come Last

Only after gesture, block, and shadows are working should you add details like nails, knuckles, or wrinkles. And even then, keep them understated. Too much detail can ruin the larger form and make the hand look overworked.

Most of the time, a hand with very little detail will be enough. Sometimes, the nails can be just suggested and veins and wrinkles should never be exaggerated.

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✨ Practice makes perfect

Look at Ingres, one of teh greatest painters of his generation, yet he was still practicing before jumping to the big canvas. Painting hands is challenging, yes—but practice makes perfect and a preparatory study is always super helpful.

More coming up this week on this topic...

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Until next time—joy and inspiration to you, my friends.

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