Problem with drawing hands

[Durrahan]

Currently, I try to improve my art style by drawing different hand poses using only limited colours(2 colours for outline, 2 for deep shadows, 2 for light shadows, 2 for the base and 2 for highlights). I can't seem to get the folded hand pose quite right, no matter how hard I try. The hand on the left looks stretched to me. If someone could point out the problem or give me directions, that would be totally great!

[MysteryMeat]

Proko on youtube has an excellent series on this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJjMiXlq9ns

[Durrahan]

Thanks for the video. I gave it another shot. I think it looks a bit better, but it still gives me the feeling of unrest. 

[MysteryMeat]

Try working with individual fingers first, then once you've drawn a couple rotations for those come back and try again while thinking of each digit with the volume needed.
Fingers are FAAAAAT, and they overlap with weird angles. Clasp your own hands like that and try to feel out how they contour and overlap, as it is the hands you've drawn on both samples look too straight and orderly for the bizarre lumpy wrist-mounted flesh-spiders our minds are used to staring at every five minutes!

[Durrahan]

I refined it a bit more and tried out 2 different shadings. I personally like 2 the most, 3 looks kind of flat and the hand in 1 looks too much like a square.

[MysteryMeat]

maybe it's the lack of knuckles doing it?

[Durrahan]

You mean like that? I actually don't want to introduce more lines, it's already really noisy and my aim is to reduce it.

[MysteryMeat]

aaah, close but not really. The knuckles are WEIRD and would bulge out your finger lines a bit towards the hand going underneath. Again, look intently at your own hand! Study what bits line up where (for me, my knuckles line up with  the last segment of my thumb) and use that insight to better work with the curves! And try to avoid entirely straight lines, hands are kinda pudgy and overlap weird. Having them line up perfectly looks awkward and doesnt really sell the volume your eyes are used to dealing with!

[32]

Use more contrast. 3 or 4 colours is all you need for this. Focus on sculpting the forms. Shading wise hands are basically just boxes or sets of boxes. Treat each bend in the finger as a distinct area of shading. Right now most of these have at least two bends of the finger represented as a single colour so it looks like the finger only has a single knuckle. I would recommend doing this without line art, it's getting in the way of a more fundamental understanding of the forms.

That said, it's looking good, hands in pixel art are hard.