Drawing Hands & Feet

By Eddie Armer

An essential guide to what is regarded as a challenging subject, this book will simplify and inspire artists to approach drawing hands and feet with precision and confidence. Eddie Armer presents a comprehensive course that will guide the artist through everything from which drawing materials to use, through to mastering proportion, perspective, light and shade. The result will be the accurate portrayal of hands and feet at rest, in motion and performing intricate tasks in a variety of different poses. With his experience, knowledge and love of the subject, Eddie will teach you how to understand the underlying anatomy of the subjects and the whole drawing process with helpful tips and advice, exercises and projects. This is an exhaustive, must-have book, a true masterclass from a true master of the medium, that will inspire any artist who wants to create realistic and characterful drawings of hands and feet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781781264515

Book preview

Introduction

While preparing notes for this book, the story of a young girl came to mind. She asked her father, what did he do at work all day? He told her that he taught adults how to draw. Incredulous, she responded: ‘You mean, they forget?’ We all start out in life being able to draw to some degree. Children begin to draw naturally long before they learn to read or write.

Drawing is a universal language and one of the oldest forms of communication, and is used for problem-solving and communicating ideas. A map hastily scribbled in the sand is the easiest way to direct one to the nearest watering hole, and is preferable to putting into words long and complicated directions. Put another way, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’.

Drawing is an important tool used by designers, artists, architects, teachers, cartographers and many other professions. It is also part of our daily lives – we can all understand how to read a symbol, a road or a warning sign – all simple drawings, communicating important messages.

We all have an innate ability to draw, even on a very simple level. At some point in our lives we may choose to develop these skills and there is no better way than by studying the human form and drawing from life. I am an advocate of life drawing as a means of improving our visual memory, as it teaches us not only to look but also to see.

Some three or four years ago, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) reported that the process of life drawing is one of the best ways to keep your mind young and possibly increase your longevity. Ask me in another fifty years whether I agree with this theory!

Due to the limitless number of shapes hands can form, they remain uniquely challenging to draw. However, knowledge is always our strongest ally, and this book will give you an understanding of not only the physiology and mechanics of both the hands and the feet, but also an understanding of how to draw them with some accuracy in a variety of positions.

Hands are expressive, punctuating our speech and aiding our communication through gesture – thumbs up if you agree! By comparison, feet are mechanically less complex, but can present the greater challenge because of their lack of character and gesture.

Since 1968, my left hand has modelled for me on several occasions; although my hands now appear a little ravaged through years of clutching pencils, I think that they have aged quite well when compared with the hands of someone with a lifetime of manual work behind them. Our hands can give an insight into our lives, as much as our face reflects our experiences. Over the past fifty years or so, I have gained a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from drawing. As it is an activity that requires focus, and places you firmly in the moment, it can also help you to gain a little respite from life’s more challenging times, aiding mindfulness and wellbeing.

At the outset of this introduction, I stated that we are all able to draw; this book is intended to help you develop your own drawing skills and look at the world – and specifically hands and feet – through an artist’s eyes.

Drawing hands and feet a personal history

A stencilled hand, after those found in the caves of El Castillo, Spain.

Our hands have been both an inspiration and an artistic starting point for ancient and modern man alike. The earliest images of hands were found stencilled on the walls of the caves of El Castillo in Spain, and are estimated to be over 40,000 years old (see above). Similar Palaeolithic-era hands appear in many other parts of the world, sending greetings from our ancient ancestors.

It took thousands of years for humankind to develop an understanding of how to represent hands and feet convincingly – ancient Egyptian artwork (3,000 B.C.–100 A.D. – see opposite, top right) represented hands and feet as flat, two-dimensional objects, often viewed side-on.

However, by the time of the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century, the concepts of perspective and foreshortening had been better comprehended, which brought depth, and a new realism, to paintings. Masters of the Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) influenced much that was to follow. Michelangelo’s depiction of the hand of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (see right) is a particularly noteworthy depiction of hands gesturing.

My own first images of hands were palm-prints pressed into wet sand on a Cornish beach in the summer of 1956, when I was three years old. It signalled the beginning of my artistic journey and marked my own ‘Palaeolithic Period’.

By 1958 I had become a conscientious schoolboy. Although I attended school regularly, I was rarely ‘present’ during a lesson, my mind having wandered off, lost to a world of daydreams and doodling. As a consequence, the covers of my school textbooks were decorated with drawings of aeroplanes, trees, horses and cowboys. These doodles lacked any depth; they looked flat and two-dimensional and represented my ‘Egyptian Period’.

As I grew older, adventure comics became an important resource. The illustrations showed hands gripping weapons, forming fists and other gestures, and I soon became adept at drawing a limited range of hands. My textbook doodles reached a more sophisticated level.

This was the way in which my drawing continued – doodling from my imaginary world of cowboys and the like – until one afternoon in 1968 when the art teacher encouraged us to make a painting of our own hands, observed from life. With the aid of a mirror, I was able to study the image of my left hand, albeit back-to-front and paint the watercolour shown on the right. I must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time of painting, and it marked a turning point