Realistic Hands - Roareye Black

Before the tutorial starts, a brief note. This is a modelling workshop and as such, it will not show how to make one specific art piece, but instead pose different bodyparts from different angles using different techniques. As such, the work will be unshaded to show the structure of the work, and it will be up to you to practice this knowledge and apply it to your own artwork.

This tutorial is focussed on the structure of the hand. Hands are one of the most structurally difficult areas to model in pixel art (And generally through all artforms), however with some patience and understanding of the skeleton, hands can become less problematic and because hands are used day to day for signals and gesturing, if you can model hands well then you can use them to portray a variety of emotion.


Your first step is to make two circles in a bold colour so they stand out, I've chosen bright red. One circle must be slightly bigger than the other, so that it has a thicker diameter. Once this is done, copy and paste three more of the smaller circle, so now you have 4 small circles and one big one. Now imagine that these four small circles are your fingertips and the thicker circle is the tip of your thumb, with this in mind place the circles out into the pose where the fingertips would end up (Remembering the lengths of fingers in relation to one another). I have drawn a light grey structure so that you can see roughly which fingers are which and where the thumb is. If it helps you, you can make one as well, but this will be built upon later and isn't necessary.


Now choose two different colours, I've chosen blue and green, so that they don't disappear in the red. Create two more circles, both of them smaller than the red circles. Make one circle bigger than the other (In my case the green circle is bigger), then copy and paste another of the (green) circle into the canvas and change it to the same colour (blue) as the smaller circle. These are going to become the joints of the fingers. With this in mind, move the larger blue circle to the approximate position that the joint of the thumb comes to, and then do the same for the top joints of the fingers with the smaller (blue) circles. You should now have the positions of the fingertips and upper joints.


Now take the larger (green) circle you made and use it as the third and final joint of the hand's skeleton, placing it as the knuckle joint of the hand (I know I've missed a joint, I'll come to that in a moment). Don't worry if the circle start to overlap, these are just the very basic forms. With the thumb, copy a red circle from the finger and recolour it green and use that as the thumb's knuckle joint to help show the chunkier form of the thumb. You now have the complete skeleton of the fingers in roughly the right position from the hand.

Fig 1: This is the end of the finger and as such should be treated as the whole fingerend. The round form can be easily modified into the end of the finger (Seen later in the tutorial). The very bottom of the circle, where there'll be a crease, will be the actual joint between the top and middle sections of the finger.

Fig 2: The base at the bottom of this circle will be the actual joint of the finger. The rest of the circle can be used to slowly bring the top and middle of the finger together to give the right structural shape. The space below the bottom of the circle will be used as the lowest section of the finger.

Fig 3: The very top of this circle will be used as the knuckle joint, which will require some knowledge of 3D movement. From the position this hand is in, it will be moving on the Lateral Axis (Depth, in and out of the screen) mostly from this angle. Unlike the other two circles, this circle will always remain here as a full sphere, because the spherical shape will help mould the hand into it's correct shape.


This step has been added in here so that you know which times it is best to edit your work. It is at this stage of your work that you should look it over for any errors and also to finalise the little finger. Now you know where the little finger is going to be, you need to resize it so it fits in. Take the two smaller circles (Green and Blue) from your current circles and make a new, even smaller one. Then recolour them in the same order as the other fingers (Red for largest, green for medium and blue for smallest in the case of this tutorial) and replace the finger circles you already had for the little finger. If you feel that it is in the wrong place, then feel free to change the position of the circles. In this case I have purposely bunched the fingers too close, so you can see that I have here editted my work without it causing any damage to anything else.


Now you need two more colours, probably best to make them a lighter and darker tone of one colour as these won't be seperate moving parts. With the lightest tone, make another circle that is bigger (Roughly 1/3rd wider in diameter) and then with the darker tone make an even bigger circle (Roughly 1/3rd wider in diameter than the last circle you made) to end up with two bigger circles. If it helps, look at your own palm as I explain these circles.

At the base of your palm is your wrist, which is a hinge joint. The wrist is connected to the thickest, most meaty part of your hand (Bigger because it is used as a counter-weight for the movement of the hand). If you look at this thick area of the palm, even feeling the base of it, it feels like two spheres (The actual hinge joint).

These spheres are actually very small, however we're making the overall hand, including the meat and flesh. The largest circle will be connected to the thumb joint, something that is emphasised on your real hand by the creases across your palm. The smaller of the two circles will be the counter-weight meat on the opposite side of the palm, as shown in the second image above and again emphasised by your own hand's contours.


Your first port of call when adding the flesh and skin overlay is to add the circular creases at the base of the palm. The length of these (As it varies from person to person) will give you an idea of how far away the fingers need to be from the base of the palm, as well as the width of the hand. With these in place, you now have the ability to make a rough outline of the hand. You can cut into the outlines of the circles, even cut a chunk out of them, if it makes the shapes more real, remember that the circles are merely guidelines, NOT finished areas of the artwork. You can add in detail here too, such as the fingernail on the small finger in picture 2. For the inner-thumb the modelling can be tricky, however an easy way to do it is to extend it in a small round from the forefinger and as it reaches the thumb, cut into it with a round going from top-to-bottom-to-top (See picture 2 for an example).


As you go around each finger, you may find some of your original circles are not as useful for guidelines as you'd hoped,and that the three circle-form used for bent fingers doesn't work for straight ones. It's a simple correction, simply copy and remove the blue circle in the middle and then place two one atop the other in it's place (As seen in image 1). Once you've finished the approximate outline for the hand, remove the circular guidelines on the fingers (As these are the hardest bits) and look at them carefully. With the guidelines removed, it should be much easier to see mistakes made to the modelling of the hand, on my example we have errors in finger length and some of the bulges (The bottom bulge in the forefinger, and the finger next to the little finger are both in error).


I made multiple alterations to the fingers as you can see such as bringing the middle finger lower into the palm so that the knuckles were all aligned. After going over the fingers, making sure the modelling is correct on them (As you can see by my comparison in picture 1) you now have to start making adjustments to the palm itself. First of all, you will want to remove the two circles that are at the base of the palm.


I have made several alterations to the hand, as seen in picture 1. I brought the thumb in by one pixel, I altered the entire (our) right side of the palm, so that the finger's knuckle makes a bulge out of the otherwise smooth skin movement from palm to finger. I also defined the bump at the wrist, stopping the sagging right side and instead bringing the right side's connection with the left in higher. From here you can draw in the palm's creases (Obviously the one's here are based off of my hand, yours will obviously be different) and colour it if you so wish, however for detail on that, go to the Shading or Texture sections of the Pixel Art Tutorials.


Another example of other poses and angles of the hand using this tutorial.