perhaps a silly ask but you are so good at drawing hands and feet, and they (feet especially) continue to elude me. do you have any tips for breaking those fuckers into manageable shapes/refs you recommend?

aww, thank you typhros!

my forever ever number one tip is using references, and more often than not i photograph my own hands (and feet!) to get the exact posing and angle i need. the downside of using only your own body as a reference is the risk of ending up drawing bodies that all look the same, and i do my best to counteract that by studying pictures of other people! just, anywhere and everywhere. i save quite a few pictures to my ref folders with thoughts of ‘oh yes, these particular hands have this particular feature that i want to give this particular character when i draw them’. then i can use my own hands as a pose reference, but give different characters their own unique hands.

(teeny tiny tip related to the above: imo a very fast and easy way to diversify your hands is to give your characters differently shaped nails. and i don’t only mean differently shaped nail tips, but the nail beds specifically! it’s amazing how diverse nails can be, no one in my family has the same nail shape. : D that being said, nails are not the only thing you can play with: hands can have different amounts of fat on them, veins that are or are not prominent, thin or thick skin that influences the color, various degrees of being manicured or not, all sorts of marks such as freckles/moles/scars/hangnails/tattoos, and tons of other stuff.)

the legendary @ adorkastock here on tumblr has two whole books of nothing but hand and feet references (which i regrettably do not own but hear are great), and i also highly recommend @ subwayhands over on instagram for random hand enrichment. simply a great collection of photography (done by Hannah La Follette Ryan) if you want to study what human hands look like.

as for how to break hands and feet down into manageable shapes: a lot of great tutorials have been done on the subject and i don’t think i’ll be able to recommend anything particularly nifty when it comes to the building blocks, but i can recommend drawing the outer shape of hands and feet first, especially when you’re working from a reference! and only then start filling it in with details.

this will help you not get lost in the minutiae of fingers and folds of skin and instead allow you to reliably capture the proportions and movement.

hope this is helpful! happy hand and feet drawing 🤞