Course Review: Kazone Art Online Drawing Hands

Hello everyone!

Welcome to my second review!

TLDR: Overall this course was excellent for teaching all the important aspects about drawing hands. I would emphasize that this is about drawing hands and in my opinion is very geared towards moving artists to draw hands from imagination, which makes sense since most of the well known Kazone instructors are Superani artists (lots of character invention).

Full Course Name: How to Draw Hands

Link: https://www.kazoneonline.com/p/how-to-draw-hands

Cost: $47

Instructor: Hyun Jin Kim

Longer Review

I’ve watched Superani artists draw figures in awe since I first got back into art/drawing a little over a year ago. When I first heard that there were several courses being offered through Kazone Online, I was excited but also thought they were a bit pricey considering what they were offering. That changed after I watched the preview video for “How To Draw Hands” on YouTube (https://youtu.be/XXiUlO4dxZY). The multi plane approach to the hand was something I had never seen taught before and intrigued me to the point of enrolling in the course. I’ll be upfront in that I am still a beginner artist and don’t have much experience with drawing the figure or hands.

There is only about 74 minutes of content, but information is really packed in there! Something for folks to know is that this has English subtitles, but is spoken in Korean (and I don’t speak Korean). Personally I did not have any issue digesting the information, and the subtitles were excellent. Hyun Jin Kim is very easy to listen to and I enjoyed watching the videos with sound.

The first few videos dive into the anatomy and proportions of the hands and fingers. I felt this really helped me approach how to analyze hands I’m looking at in reference photos and ensure that any hands I’m drawing are properly scaled. Throughout my watching of the videos, I often paused and wrote down the information as it is quite densely packed and I knew I would need to do additional studies later.

The last few videos dive into putting realistic looking features on the hand and how to build hands out that look realistic every time (including a last video that dives into fingernails). I want to really emphasize that this provides a nice framework for artists to analyze and draw hands. While there is anatomy, there is no dedicated videos/portion of the difference between male and female hands (although there are small details mentioned occasionally), or much in depth discussion about the muscles in the hands. Movement is covered, and when trying to visually communicate, I think that is one of the more important aspects of believable hands.

One topic that I did feel was a bit left out is a dedicated section to the thumb specifically, however when I sat down and started applying the knowledge from the course, placing the thumb was not an issue due to using its proportion related to the index finger (discussed in the course).

As a follow on, I assigned myself 10-15 hands per day (from reference) to reinforce the learning and practice. I was pleasantly surprised with my results the first day after and I continue to improve to this day. As someone who couldn’t draw a hand (or my opposite drawing one) from reference quickly or convincingly, I am extremely happy with the results of the class.

One last point about the shorter format of the class is going back through it does not feel daunting. I went through the entire course in one sitting, and plan on doing it again in the future to further reinforce my learning. Many other courses breaking down how to draw the hand are hours on end, and while they may have good information it can feel like a massive time investment to rewatch.