Learning How to do Paintings of Hands!

In preparation to do paintings of hands, you should already have a good understanding of how to construct the hands properly through simple gesture sketches. So follow along in this lesson for painting hands digitally to apply what you have learned!

As such, this lesson on how to paint a hand will take these simple gesture drawings and incorporate it into the actual painting.

That way, not only does it emphasize the need to make quick sketches, but it also builds a good under painting to work with.

Moreover, it reduces the amount of mistakes that can possibly happen near the final stages of painting the hands as proportions and shadows have already been considered in the sketching stages.

So open up your digital art program and see how we put the concept of using your sketches to create a digital painting.

1. How to paint using a simple sketch

Your sketch will be very important to learning how to do paintings of hands correctly. Start off simply drawing the hand out with the brush tool. Clean up any unnecessary lines after you have determined the proper proportions.

Now, here’s where you will create your under painting. Create a new layer underneath your sketch and paint it with a general tone of what you want the color of your hands to be.

Make sure your brush is set to 100% pressure as you do not want any type of transparency caused by the lack of pressure.

do paintings of hands

Depending whether you have erased lines or just paint over it with white in the sketch layer, you may need to set the blend mode of the layer to “multiply” to show the layer containing the hand color underneath.

Once you have both layers done, merge them together to form a solid object.

2. Smudging and refining

On this step, you need to turn on the ability to preserve transparency. That means that any smudging or coloring will not go outside the boundaries of the shape contained in that layer.

With that in mind, you will do paintings of hands within the perimeters of the shape object created in the first step.

do paintings of hands

My suggestion is to smudge the black outlines away and towards the edges of the hand shape as you don’t want to make it look cartoonish. Then, use your brush tool, sample the colors created from the smudging process, and repaint the hand.

Use a lighter color and paint where the light will hit to focus on bone structure like the knuckles or joints.

3. Paint the hands with a smaller brush

In this step, you will need to switch to a smaller brush tip to work on the finer details. The primary focus here is to look at how the skin folds.

Some suggestions would be to look at the bend points of the palm and fingers. You will need to sample a tone that is lighter than the original skin tone for the wrinkles and rim lights of the hands.

do paintings of hands

You may also need to switch back to the smudge tool to blend the colors in better as you work on the skin folds. Do not forget about the finger nails either! You want a clear separation of color that defines the nails from the rest of the fingers.

Once that is done, switch to a darker tone. This is used primarily for the creases of skin around the joints and bendable sections of the palm.

Use short bursts of lines for the creases to further give off the illusion of segmentation and skin folds.

4. More details

At this point in time, you are almost done learning how to do paintings of hands digitally. The final step is color manipulation and final adjustments such as making sure that the fingers are at the proper length. In this example, I have shortened a few fingers because it did not bend at the proper joints.

For color management, I had to make sure that it matches the white background the hands are positioned against.

There are many ways of doing this. I can do it manually and recolor using a very large brush and setting the color output of the brush to “lighten” or “color” as to not take away the details.

do paintings of hands

As an alternative, I can also use the dodge tool to lighten the edges of the hands.

Moreover, the other methods can include internal color manipulation tools of the program itself such as changing the overall hue.

Either way, you have plenty of digital painting options to choose from!

In the end, this lesson will be a very good stepping stone to not only learning how to do paintings of hands, but to paint other things that require this particular process of creating a quick sketch as a foundation for a finished painting.

I look forward to your progress. Make sure to submit it in the site's gallery!