See a drawing demo on how to draw baby hands. They are tricky to draw. Their anatomy is totally different from an adult’s hand!
- 1 min. short (pastel brands)
- 45 min. video (baby hands)
- 92 min. video (child portrait)
Tips for how to capture the volume and form of a baby hand, as well as how to articulate the lighting on the hand are explained.
Demo by Art Prof Clara Lieu and Teaching Artist Jordan McCracken-Foster.
Video Walkthrough
- Babies are very challenging to draw, their proportions are completely different from the proportions of an adult.
- Especially in art history, paintings of babies often portray them like little old men.
- On a baby’s hand there is pretty much no indication of bone anywhere.
- Areas where you would see bone on an adult hand, like the knuckles, appear as dimples on a baby’s hand.
- Look for where the fat in a baby’s hand overlap, what form is in front of another?
- Adding wrinkles to a drawing of a baby’s hand often is too much.
- Downplaying the wrinkles in your drawing, or even skipping the wrinkles altogether is a way to handle this.
- Working on toned paper for soft pastel is a good way to get started. You won’t have any white grain in your drawing like when using white paper.
- Blocking in big areas of color with the side of the soft pastel is a good way to establish tone in the drawing.
- Everyone has a totally different way of learning, so it’s a good idea to learn from many different teachers.
Prof Lieu’s Tips
In general, the hands/feet/head are chronically ignored by everybody in a short gesture drawing.
We all (myself included) like to use the “I didn’t have time” excuse to explain why we didn’t include those parts, but really, it’s about having a placeholder for where the hands and feet will eventually be.
So even the crappiest 2 min drawing should, in theory, have a light mark to approximate where a head or foot will be. I think people get really hung up on likeness with figure drawing, so it often feels like something isn’t worth drawing unless we have sufficient time to make it recognizable.
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