Drawing Challenge: Hands Holding Objects

In this drawing challenge, I delved into some observational drawing, taking on the notoriously challenging subject of the human hand.

Hands are full of bones, joints, muscles, and tendons. They are extremely complex pieces of machinery that can be articulated in many ways.

Even Artificial Intelligence image and video generators famously have had tons of trouble with realistically depicting hands. AI is known to hallucinate bizarre monstrosities when it comes to this particular subject, struggling especially to render hands that are gesturing or holding objects (due to not understanding the context of the situation and the 3D spatial relationships).

Hands have intricate 3D structures and can appear in countless poses, making them difficult for both artists and AI to accurately replicate.

I got inspired to take this as my object of focus as part of the progression suggested in Marc Brunet’s 30 Days of Drawing video (which included the 3D maze in perspective from my last drawing challenge). His challenge was to render your own hand holding a cylindrical object (at 12:22 in the following video).

At first, I just tried to copy his example and struggled quite a bit to make hands that looked right. Like I’ve mentioned, hands are complex and subtle, so my early attempts to copy his drawing could look wonky.

His only recommendation for this particular challenge in the video is breaking the hand down into simple volumes and then adding detail. This means that you break the hand down into separate simple shapes and then connect them together in more detail once you have the fundamental form down.

I think that is great advice not only for drawing, but for tackling anything that seems complex. Breaking complicated things down into simple, manageable parts reduces the overwhelming complexity. It takes a big, scary task and turns it into a series of several simplified tasks that are much more comfortable to think about and execute.

In Marc's challenge, the hand is holding an abstract "cylinder". I wanted to add some visual interest so I added some different objects to the hands I drew. I decided to make the abstract cylinder a stick of dynamite. I found other reference drawings of hands holding things and also drew hands holding a walkie-talkie, a banana, and a boomerang.

I also found a reference image of several hands holding cylinders in various different poses and from different angles. Sketching these was quite difficult and some of them look seriously messed up, but it provided good practice for my observational drawing skills.