- By Christine Hattingh
- 6 Mins
- Intermediate
- Drawing Tutorials
How to Draw a Skeleton Hand
Get ready for Halloween with this how to draw a skeleton hand 3 step tutorial
Is your favorite holiday Halloween? Then we have the perfect tutorial for you today, where you can learn how to draw a skeleton hand. With a few simple steps, artists of any skill level can create a realistic and spooky-looking hand for their spooky clipart collection. Whether you are making funny sublimated t-shirts or decorating a haunted house, this will surely frighten anyone.
For this Halloween drawing guide, gather your supplies. Your supplies can be traditional or digital mediums such as pencils, pastels, or Procreate. Make sure you have a sketching, lining, and coloring tool to make your drawing.
If you are using Procreate, then you can get FREE Procreate brushes at Design Bundles. We also have extensive Procreate tutorials filled with tips, tricks, and step-by-step guides.
Step 1 - Roughly Sketch a Skeleton Hand
Let’s get started by making a rough sketch of our skeleton hand. First, we are going to create a guide for the hands pose and then add the bones to the fingers, palms, and wrist. Using a removable or light shade sketching medium like a pencil is recommended.
Create a Guide
Draw a minimal guide on your page to determine where the wrist starts and finner tips end. Start drawing an oval shape for the wrist, and add five long, varying height lines at the top for the palm (shown in red).
Then, add two sections of lines (blue and green) for the fingers. Lastly, add short lines on the index, middle, ring, and pinky finger.
As you can see from our example, the thumb is on the left, and the shortest finger with three bone guidelines.
Shape the Bones
Starting in the oval, draw seven rough shapes as we did for the bones found in the wrist or carpus.
Around each of the guidelines made for the fingers, draw bone shapes for each section. As you get further away from the wrist, make the bones narrower. The distal phalanx (bones in the fingertips) should be rounded at the end.
Step 2 - Permanently Define the Skeleton Hand
Your skeleton hand sketch is ready for outlining with a dark medium. You can use a medium such as a pen, ink brush, or marker to make your outline. When tracing your sketch, avoid defining the guide and any lines that you don’t need.
Once you have made the skeleton hand outline, remove your rough sketches. Then, add minor line art details to your skeleton drawing by adding lines to texture the bones.
Step 3 - Apply Color to your Illustration
Switch to your coloring medium and get ready to add color to your illustration. Feel free to experiment with a combination of mediums and color palettes. We added light shades of brown to give the bones a realistic look and applied darker areas and highlights to bring our artwork to life.
Why not try adding other Halloween clipart elements to your skeleton hands? You can create bone-chilling crafts or add florals and glitter to glamorize them.
You did an excellent job learning to draw this remarkable skeleton. Fill your digital library with custom-drawn spooky items by checking out our free drawing tutorials. We’ll take you step-by-step through how to draw plants, animals, and food.
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