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Writer's pictureFredo Declán Hernández

Sculpting Hands Technique

I’m very excited about this post due to having discovered a very new technique for me …. very excited — 🙂

Hands …. something I consider to be one of the parts of the body that sadly does get overlooked and it’s obvious on a lot of sculpts. I know that whenever I would sculpt hands I would always come to the point were I tell myself “I wish the bends in the fingers would be sharper” to make the hands look as though the joints in the hands really are bending. So, recently I thought ….

“Well, the body has a “skeleton” to it (the armature), why not the hands to help the joints bend ??”.

I had seen this done with larger sized sculpts but because they were large sculpts it didn’t immediately hit me to do the same for smaller sculpts but boy am I glad it finally hit me !

So, onto how I did it –

1 ) I created an “armature” for the hands or a skeleton, if you will;


as you can see, I added an extra wire underneath the fingers to keep them in place so that when I’m adding the other wire fingers and when it comes time to cover the wire with clay, that they more or less stay in place.

2 ) I’m ready to cover the palm with clay, then the fingers afterward;


3 ) Now I can start shaping and trimming the clay with my tools to get these results;


Now, here’s where I ran into an issue because I had with posing the fingers. See, before I started any of this, I thought to myself that I wanted to bend the wire fingers before I covered them with clay so as not to run into this issue you’re seeing. None the less, it worked out, it’s completely fixable, fairly simply to do and in forgetting it also allowed me to illustrate what and what not to do any why;


Here’s the not-so-final image of the hand. But now the only thing that’s really left to do with it is add in the wrinkle details.



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