How to Draw Cartoons > How to Draw Hands and Feet

Hands express personality just as much as faces do. Some artists think hands are even more expressive than faces. Instead of striving for anatomical exactness, the cartoonist must seek to represent the essential strength and gesture, or the action line of the hand. Think of the hand as a mass. Forget knuckles and tendons. Block in the mass as oval or rectangle. Let a light line represent the action line of the whole hand. The three major parts of the hand are palm or back, thumb, and the fingers as a single unit. The average hand is about as long as the distance from scalp to chin.

Use your own hand as a model. Get your right hand in reverse by looking in a mirror. Draw the hand as a three-unit mass, in varied action. Keep practicing, remembering all the time that simplicity and elimination of detail are essentials in good cartooning.

How to Draw Feet

Even feet can show expression. The size and shape of feet give an impression of character in cartooning. Study feet so that you can more easily make funny exaggerations. Consider the foot as a three-unit mass. The average foot is about a third larger than the hand. Draw the foot showing side, front, and bottom views. Draw different sizes of feet.

Choose your own way of representing the mass that forms the major part of the foot, the mass that makes toes, and the mass that represents the ankle. Some sort of triangle is usually considered the easiest way to represent the main mass.

Shoes can show personality as much as clothes and features. Collect as many types of shoes as you can for your morgue.

Practice drawing old shoes, new shoes, baby shoes, shoes for Pin-Up Girls, for Mr. J. Q. Public, for bums and dudes. Then adopt your own symbol for a general type of shoe and use it in your cartoons, varying it in style, size, and shape according to whose shoe it represents.

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