100 Hands Challenge
Human hands can be especially difficult to draw, because they are pretty complex body parts! With four fingers, wrinkly knuckles, and a thumb that’s so different from the other fingers - the visual info can feel overwhelming and confusing.
There are lots of artists on YouTube who have participated in the 100 Hands Challenge, but I want to shout out Jess Karp’s channel, because I first saw it from her video. I decided to take up the challenge and gather my own reference images that I’m happy to share with you below so you can also join!
GATHERING HAND REFERENCES
When learning how to draw hands, it’s important to gather exceptional references for your drawings. Hands come in all shapes and sizes and tend to look very different when we are children versus when we are aging.
Young hands may appear plump and have smooth, soft skin while aging hands may appear dry with wrinkles and loose skin. Male hands might look meatier with rough, calloused skin especially if they work in the yard, lift weights, or otherwise don’t often wear lotion. Female hands may appear more elongated with clean nails and more delicate features. Of course, it depends on the person and what kind of lifestyle they live.
When gathering references for drawing hands, I recommend starting out with black & white photos. Pinterest is always the first place I look, but I encourage you to also dig through magazines and photo references you might find in books.
DRAWING HANDS IN DIFFERENT MEDIUMS
For my version of the 100 Hands Challenge, I highly encourage you to start with an easy medium and gradually challenge yourself by moving to a more difficult art medium every 10 hands. This is the perfect challenge to keep up in your Handmade Sketchbook, or you can ride out the challenge in Procreate on iPad Pro and simply create a new Stack. Or you can totally use Photoshop, Illustrator, (or whatever software / art medium floats your boat) and you can always adapt the challenge to better your own practice.
I personally believe that one medium informs (and improves) another so if you’d like to follow my guidelines here they are below:
10 Days of Drawing 10 Hands Each:
Graphite (Hands 1-10)
Pen + Ink (Hands 11-20)
Charcoal (Hands 21-30)
Colored Pencils (Hands 31-40)
Alcohol Markers (Hands 41-50)
Posca Paint Pens (Hands 51-60)
Watercolor (Hands 61-70)
Gouache (Hands 71-80)
Acrylic Paint (Hands 81-90)
Mixed Media (Hands 91-100)
The first three mediums are completely Grayscale and I’ve included 26 Black & White reference photos. You may choose 10 for Graphite, 10 for Charcoal, and add 4 color photos to the remaining 6 Black & White reference photos for Pen & Ink. Being able to easily see the value build up in the hands is very helpful for beginning to understand hands.
ADDING NATURAL COLOR TO HANDS
Once you’re finished with your first 30 black & white drawings of hands, it’s time to start applying color to the hands with drawing mediums. It’s important to practice a variety of skin tones and ages of hands. For example, an elderly hand in a lighter skin tone might have more reddish or bluish colors than a younger hand especially if the skin is loose and appearing translucent.
When adding color, I recommend starting with an erasable drawing medium such as colored pencil and as you get more comfortable with different colors in the flesh, moving on to something like oil pastels which can’t exactly be erased, but can take a lot of layers and blending.
CONTINUING TO EXPLORE HANDS
Your 100 Hands do not need to all be finished, polished drawings. I enjoy doing these kinds of art challenges in my sketchbook for exactly that reason: to keep the drawings somewhat casual. You can open your 9”X12” (or in my case 8.5”X11” handmade) sketchbook to a new spread, or two open pages, and draw 10 hands per spread.
You don’t have to draw your hands in the same order as other artists. You can decide which hands will fit together in your sketchbook to make a nice composition while continuing to explore hands in many different positions.
Approach this art challenge as a study. You are learning the anatomy of the hands, you are learning to expect how the hand will move, how the fingers will bend, and how the thumb will position itself with the fingers.
MOVING TO PAINTING HANDS
Now, that you’ve drawn at least 50 hands, I want to challenge you to try painting the hands. A nice transition into painting comes with using Posca Paint Pens. They operate a lot like markers and other drawing utensils, but there is actually acrylic paint inside. Pump the nib a few times and watch the acrylic paint fill up the tip. From there, it’s like drawing with paint!
The fun thing about Posca Paint Pens is that your color palette will be very limited so you can explore coloring the hands in unnatural, stylistic colors. If you’re not ready to jump into unrealistic colors, I’d encourage you to try gouache or watercolors next.
If you’re painting with watercolors or regular gouache, remember to work from light to dark. Begin with a light wash of the highlight colors. From there, you can add layers of mid-tones and eventually the darkest shadows.
If you’re working with acrylic gouache, you can layer light colors over dark so you don’t have to worry so much about working from light to dark. And if your watercolor or gouache hands accidentally get too dark, you can add additional highlights once the paint is dry with Posca Paint Pens, gel pens, or white gouache.
PERSEVERING WITH HANDS
At this point in the challenge, you’re guaranteed to be drawing and painting hands at twice the speed you started with. Hurray! But don’t give up. You still have a lot to learn by drawing all of these additional hands in positions you haven’t approached yet.
By this point, I encourage you to level up your medium to acrylic paint. If you’re an oil painter, or simply want to improve your all-over painting skills, acrylic paint is the best precursor to oil paint. Oil paint takes days to dry so it’s not ideal for a sketchbook challenge whereas acrylic paint dries quickly, and like oil paint, can take many layers.
We’ll do a final artwork at the very end of this challenge so if you’re an oil painter you can look forward to creating a final piece on stretched canvas. But first, finish the challenge in acrylic paints to push yourself to expert level artistic skill when it comes to drawing and painting hands.
ADDING STYLE TO THE HANDS
Woo hoo!! You’re on the last leg of the 100 Hands Art Challenge. Up till now, we’ve been drawing and painting hands in a naturalistic way. Some artists will sketch more loosely, while others will tighten up the sketches and stick more closely to photo realism.
But now it’s time to add a little personality to the hands! Hands can tell so much about a person; hands can become like a type of portrait.
Looking at the hands below, you get a much better idea about the human being attached to that hand: what they’re like, what their style is, if they’re fashionable or sophisticated or creative, soft or loud.
Your last 10 hands are reserved for Mixed Media, but you could also draw these hands in a digital format like Procreate on iPad Pro. Perhaps, now you’re ready to work with Posca Paint Pens and get some fun colors on these hands. If you continue working traditionally, see how you can layer mediums you’ve already used.
Perhaps you begin with a soft watercolor wash, then add layers of colored pencil and textured charcoal in shadows. Maybe you start out with Posca Paint Pens or Acryla Gouache and fill in your underpainting. From there, you add Pen & Ink line quality around the contours of your hands. There are so many possibilities!
CREATE A FINAL HAND DRAWING
For your very last hand, choose a reference photo that you’re most inspired by! Your medium is your own choice, but I challenge you to create a large drawing or painting that you’ll be proud of as a final piece of artwork to end this challenge with a bang.
For oil painters, this is your chance to stretch a large canvas and zoom in on allll of the tiny details in the hand that weren’t necessarily accessible in smaller sketches.
Infuse your own art style into this final hand artwork. Get creative. Do your own thing. You’ve worked so incredibly hard on this art challenge and undoubtedly learned a lot! It’s time to tie a bow on this 100 Hands Challenge and tip your hat to yourself for how much you’ve grown artistically.
If you want to learn more about drawing hands, be sure to check out my Skillshare class below on Drawing Hands. Also, during the month of January we’ll be going LIVE with the 100 Hands Challenge for “Handuary.” Sign up below to join the art challenge in real time!
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JOIN MY HANDUARY ART CHALLENGE
Draw 100 Hands during the month of January
+ Get prompts every 3 days!
HANDUARY ART CHALLENGE
Draw 100 hands during the month of January and receive prompts from me every 3 days.
Create 10 Hands in a new art medium every 3 days until you reach 100 Hands!
