Here is what a hand should look like on paper. A good exercise is to put your hand onto the paper, and then trace it. Study the outline, and then try to replicate it without tracing.

Another good idea is to try drawing the wrinkles and other minor details of your hand. Also, pay extra close attention to the locations of the joints, how the fingernail is set into the fingertip, and how far each finger can bend, or it"s "range of motion".

Take a look at this picture here. It"s a hand composed of simple shapes. The arm is a rectangle, the palm itself is an egg shape, and so are the fingers, and the thumb makes a triangle. Look at the picture to the right to get a closer look. The blue lines indicate the area that the palm is made up of, and the red triangle is what you should draw to start the shape of the thumb. You can then fill in the rest of the lines after the shapes have been created.

Ok, when you start drawing fingers, you do NOT want to do this. Never EVER draw fingers like this. Look at your own hand, do you see V shapes between your fingers? No, you don't, you see gaps, small spaces between your fingers. So why draw them this way then?

This is the way you should draw the gaps between your fingers. Like I said before, pay attention to the lines that form around your fingers, and make sure you draw them. They really help to increase the overall look of the picture.

As you can see, near the ring and pinky fingers, the fold of skin makes downward curves. Make sure you draw that. The thumb is a little different, because it planes away from the hand, so the further it is from the hand, the more the web of skin between the thumb and index finger increases.

Here is another example of the fingers. One thing you need to pay close attention to is the pinky. If you look closely enough, the pinky makes a direct line across your hand to your thumb, so if it helps to draw a line across the hand so you can better place the fingers, then do that.

Also, the pinky acts a little differently than the other three fingers. Look at this picture. When you hold your hand like this, the pinky moves away from your hand and turns slightly so that it's not arching like the other three fingers. The pinky has a wider range of motion than your ring, middle, and index fingers. What I mean is, the pinky can move left and right much further than the othe three can, so that causes it to look a little differently when you hold your hand in certain positions. Fool around with your hand and try different poses, makeing sure to watch what your pinky is doing on each pose.