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The great illustrator, Norman Rockwell, once commented, “They’ll forgive anything …except heads and hands”…It’s absolutely true!

Viewers grant artists a lot of leeway on other body parts, but the proportion and gestures of the face and hands must be reasonably accurate or the work looks amateurish. In fact, some portrait artists like Boldini habitually lengthened the proportions of their painted figures…their clientele delighted in the elegant distortions!

Painting the head is tricky enough, even though it only has two masses:

1. The fused bones of the cranium and
2. The lower jaw.

The hand has 27 bones and a number of tendons and muscles easily seen beneath the skin. The hand is as expressive as the face! Early on, I had to make a decision: I could avoid painting hands or I could “attack my weakness”.  I bought a copy of George Bridgman’s Book of a Hundred Hands ($9, Dover Press) and spent six months copying every illustration.

Here are a few tips:

• Use straight lines rather than curves, you will be more accurate…and the work will look more powerful.
• Think of the middle finger; the distance from the wrist to the knuckle is equal to the distance from knuckle to fingertip. (Beginning artists tend to make the fingers either too long or too stubby.
• The fingers taper.
• The back of the hand is arched from side to side. The palm is concave. 

• Your palm has two muscular mounds: the hypothenar eminence on the little finger side and the thenar eminence on the thumb side. If you don’t show those mounds, the hand will look salamander-like.
• There is space between the fingers where they emerge from the palm (they don’t form a sharp V).
• The fingers aren’t parallel; they radiate from a point on the wrist (otherwise they wouldn’t fit when you make a fist).

I just finished filming an instructional video on painting heads and hands.  Liliedahl Video Productions should release it in late 2018 or early 2019.