Cartoon Pin Up Girl | 04 |Drawing the Hands & Skirt

how to draw pinups finished sketch

In this lesson, you’ll be drawing the hands and skirt for your cartoon pin-up girl

Drawing the Hands

Want to learn how to draw pinups? In this lesson, you’re going to learn all about drawing the hands. If you had trouble with the hands in the past – you’ll want to pay especially close attention.

Thinking of the hand as having a rectangle base is a good idea. Take a quick look at your own hand and try to make some different poses.

First flatten your hand out completely, and then touch your pinky finger and your thumb. Notice how when you touch these two fingers that your whole hand curls in on itself.

When learning how to draw pinups, it’s important to understand that the main part of the hand is able to curve and bend on its own.

Many drawing books will show you to draw the underlying structure of the hand as a rigid box, but you will get much better results if you think of the hands more like a deck of cards that can lay flat, and also be bent into a curved shape.

After creating the base of the hand you can divide it up into 4 parts for each of the fingers.

Notice how the base of the hand bumps down from where it attaches to the arm at the wrist. This is another very important part of hand drawing that you’ll always want to incorporate into your drawings to show that natural transition from the arm to the hand.

Remember that when you are drawing the fingers, they aren’t going to all stay together evenly. You can try this on your own and notice how you grab things, or rest your hands on objects. The fingers will form all kinds of interesting positions.

Add the Skirt

After the hand has been defined you can drop down to the skirt and start to fill that in. When learning how to draw pinups, try and keep in mind the curvature of the legs so that you can draw the dress curving around those legs.

Finishing Up

Using the same method of construction that you used on the first hand, go ahead and draw in the second hand. The major difference is that this hand is turned up, but if you still start with your deck of cards construction method you will have a good place to start from.

What’s Up Next?

In the next lesson on how to draw pinups, you’re going to jump into drawing the feet. Drawing feet is another area of the body where people often stumble.

If this sounds like you, don’t worry – you’ll be getting a much deeper insight into how to draw and understand this tricky part of the body.