@Spooner
hello hello! let's see what we can crank out of the old advice machine.
hands are haaard and i'm still getting to grips (lol) with them myself, but i can for sure share some tips! the biggest thing for me was learning to forget about the structure and start by just drawing the overall gesture. hands have lots of fiddly bits and joints and so on, and if you try and approach them by drawing one finger at a time it's just a nightmare (with such issues as running out of space for the fifth finger, as you've experienced). instead, it's best to start by portioning out the real estate for your fingers first, and then filling it in. when i'm sketching, either from imagination or doing a study, i try to think about the 'envelope' of the hand first:
photos from AdorkaStock's 50 hand challenge pack. the other part to this, of course, is refs and a lot of practice haha. but imo refs are mainly useful for once you're building in structure and fine details; if you can internalise the rough envelope shape then you should find the basic shapes of the hand to be much more agreeable.
on to the second part - ooh, yeah, i get what you mean! for rigging in Flash, right? (i think Flash is actually called something else these days, but i digress.) so, there are kind of two angles to this! one is the style concerns - how best to simplify this hand shape, in a way that looks appealing? but there's also a mechanical concern - how best to put these hands together for functional puppetry?
let's take a crack at the first one, because even that's pretty tricky...
ultimately, finding an appealing way to stylise and simplify something is really tough. even the sketches at the bottom here were way trickier than i thought they'd be! my gut feeling would probably be to go with a human-ish cartoon hand and just tweak the proportions slightly - add claws, exaggerate the third and fourth fingers, and you're good to go. (if you're not married to anatomical accuracy, you could even go for a three-fingered design, and exaggerate the middle finger - ah, although now that i've written that, i can immediately think of a reason you should actually Maybe Not. but the three-fingered hands in cartoons serve a strong purpose - it leads to a clearer gesture, and honestly it's also a lot easier to draw.)
as for the second prong, here, the mechanical design constraints really hinge on what you want the character to be doing and how you want them to be able to emote. i'm not an expert on making cartoons in flash by any means! but i'm pretty sure that the usual approach is to avoid rigging the hand as much as possible, and instead just have a couple of different hand poses/symbols (and switch to a closeup hand puppet for detail shots). if i was doing something similar i'd have one bone in the hand max, and 'animate' it by deforming via squash and stretch.
after that it just becomes a question of, what do you want the hands to be doing? i think you could get a lot of mileage out of just one relaxed pose at a 3/4 view and one extra, maybe waving? if you want the character to pick up a coffee cup, is it really better to try and contort a hand rig around a cup handle, or would it just be easier to draw a new hand-holding-coffee symbol and switch it out when needed? 2D 'puppets' are kind of a midpoint between frame-by-frame 2D animation (where you need a new drawing every frame if you want to move things) and 3D animation (where animation is made almost entirely by moving and contorting a model). because of that, i think you always have to be conscious of which approach will be easier to do a different thing - treating it like a puppet, or treating it like a drawing? and which side a given action will fall on depends on the action, and also the complexity of the puppet; i think you might have more leeway to contort a simpler 3-fingered puppet, whereas for a four-fingered hand it's harder to pull off without it looking a bit weird.
all this is just my musings, though! i dunno how useful this actually is to put into practice, i've never done anything like it myself - i don't have any qualifications other than 'amateur cartoon liker', haha. i think the other thing i'd suggest is watching flash cartoons and seeing if you can figure out how they're made. try and reverse-engineer how their characters are rigged, and look out for the 'cheats' they use to animate tricky parts, like hands! i'll wrap up here because this has been equally text-wall-y, but i hope it helps!
hello hello! let's see what we can crank out of the old advice machine.
hands are haaard and i'm still getting to grips (lol) with them myself, but i can for sure share some tips! the biggest thing for me was learning to forget about the structure and start by just drawing the overall gesture. hands have lots of fiddly bits and joints and so on, and if you try and approach them by drawing one finger at a time it's just a nightmare (with such issues as running out of space for the fifth finger, as you've experienced). instead, it's best to start by portioning out the real estate for your fingers first, and then filling it in. when i'm sketching, either from imagination or doing a study, i try to think about the 'envelope' of the hand first:
photos from AdorkaStock's 50 hand challenge pack. the other part to this, of course, is refs and a lot of practice haha. but imo refs are mainly useful for once you're building in structure and fine details; if you can internalise the rough envelope shape then you should find the basic shapes of the hand to be much more agreeable.
on to the second part - ooh, yeah, i get what you mean! for rigging in Flash, right? (i think Flash is actually called something else these days, but i digress.) so, there are kind of two angles to this! one is the style concerns - how best to simplify this hand shape, in a way that looks appealing? but there's also a mechanical concern - how best to put these hands together for functional puppetry?
let's take a crack at the first one, because even that's pretty tricky...
ultimately, finding an appealing way to stylise and simplify something is really tough. even the sketches at the bottom here were way trickier than i thought they'd be! my gut feeling would probably be to go with a human-ish cartoon hand and just tweak the proportions slightly - add claws, exaggerate the third and fourth fingers, and you're good to go. (if you're not married to anatomical accuracy, you could even go for a three-fingered design, and exaggerate the middle finger - ah, although now that i've written that, i can immediately think of a reason you should actually Maybe Not. but the three-fingered hands in cartoons serve a strong purpose - it leads to a clearer gesture, and honestly it's also a lot easier to draw.)
as for the second prong, here, the mechanical design constraints really hinge on what you want the character to be doing and how you want them to be able to emote. i'm not an expert on making cartoons in flash by any means! but i'm pretty sure that the usual approach is to avoid rigging the hand as much as possible, and instead just have a couple of different hand poses/symbols (and switch to a closeup hand puppet for detail shots). if i was doing something similar i'd have one bone in the hand max, and 'animate' it by deforming via squash and stretch.
after that it just becomes a question of, what do you want the hands to be doing? i think you could get a lot of mileage out of just one relaxed pose at a 3/4 view and one extra, maybe waving? if you want the character to pick up a coffee cup, is it really better to try and contort a hand rig around a cup handle, or would it just be easier to draw a new hand-holding-coffee symbol and switch it out when needed? 2D 'puppets' are kind of a midpoint between frame-by-frame 2D animation (where you need a new drawing every frame if you want to move things) and 3D animation (where animation is made almost entirely by moving and contorting a model). because of that, i think you always have to be conscious of which approach will be easier to do a different thing - treating it like a puppet, or treating it like a drawing? and which side a given action will fall on depends on the action, and also the complexity of the puppet; i think you might have more leeway to contort a simpler 3-fingered puppet, whereas for a four-fingered hand it's harder to pull off without it looking a bit weird.
all this is just my musings, though! i dunno how useful this actually is to put into practice, i've never done anything like it myself - i don't have any qualifications other than 'amateur cartoon liker', haha. i think the other thing i'd suggest is watching flash cartoons and seeing if you can figure out how they're made. try and reverse-engineer how their characters are rigged, and look out for the 'cheats' they use to animate tricky parts, like hands! i'll wrap up here because this has been equally text-wall-y, but i hope it helps!
