There’s a lot of heavy sighing in my drawing class when it’s time to face the 
hand. Everyone agrees that drawing the hand is hard. I don’t think it’s hard, so much as complex. But so wonderful! I once spent a week drawing nothing but my left hand, six hours a day. Now I love drawing hands. And I love teaching it. This can be done, boys and girls. Stick with it. For starters, the hand has three parts, the palm, the block of fingers, and the thumb. Just THREE parts! The palm is fairly rigid. The fingers—unless you’re drawing a 
Balinese dancer—function pretty much in unison. The thumb is limited in its movement. Well, ok, it’s still hard to draw. But you can organize your seeing of this beast. Here’s how my class room demo looks. Notice hat the length of the fingers is approximately the same as the length of the palm. The thumb’s movement defines an arc. The fingers come out of the palm in a one sided V-form, with the knuckle of the middle finger at the peak of the V.
Unless you’re doing an anatomical study (which I would recommend once
in a while, especially at the beginning), try not to overdraw the hand. Keep your lines graceful and focus on the general structure, thinking of the hand as a “mitten” form where the fingers are not individually articulated. And allow for some ambiguity. A page of studies of the hand is worthy of being framed. In a future post I want to talk about why that might be, about the emotional significance of the hand to us. Here’s a student drawing by Cheryl B.
While my paintings are abstract, I feel the need to draw representationally all the time. I work in series both in painting and in drawing. One of my 
drawing series has to do with 17th century Dutch art. Here is a page of pencil studies derived from figures found in the paintings of Christian van Couwenbergh, Cornelis de Man, Joos van Craesbeck, Johannes Verkolje and Johannes Vermeer. In doing these pages I almost inevitably also draw my own left hand. On this page it appears three times. I tell you, there’s something about the human hand…irresistible.
A high-school friend of mine (who last I know was drawing comic books professionally) couldn’t draw a proper foot to save his life. The feet of his people were always disproportionate or otherwise awkward. I don’t know if he ever overcame that particular problem of his, either. Hands, however, he could draw fairly well. He tended to draw them as mittens as well, come to think of it.
Your friend was not alone. Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh’s buddy, could draw neither feet nor hands. They came out looking like flippers, especially the feet. He still made it into the big times–museums and art history books. Why? Two possible reasons. a) The coarseness of the appendages was seen as commensurate with the “primitive” Polynesians who were his subject. We don’t think that way anymore, but in the late 19th century European art lovers did. b) He compensated for his poor draftsmanship by using riveting colors and by plugging the viewer’s imagination into sexual desires and the desire to be rid of “civilization’s discontents.” Maybe if his hands and feet had been more graceful, these effects would have been diminished.