Drawing tricky subjects--hands!

We were talking about drawing hands the other day, and I remembered someone suggesting you think of the hand shape as a mitten, first, simplify it to that form, THEN add fingers and thumbs and details.  So I decided to do a couple of quick demos.  (And yep, I turned over my mug of coffee, but I don't like to waste paper!  These are leftover sheets from my bookbinding project, cut to handy demo size. 

Most of them are still coffee-free...

 

I was able to see the foreshortened forms easily this way...but my thumb's still a bit short too!

More playing with mitten shapes and tricky hand positions...

You can see where the "mitten" lines were...and also see that I've got a bit of arthritis!

Tweak as you need to, nobody says you HAVE to stay within the lines if you see you need to correct a bit, but it DOES give you good guidelines...