Hi @Lauren F., nice studies! My favorite is the first one; I think it has the strongest gesture and structure! I'll do my best to help you further: THE FIGURE DRAWING COURSE I think what would help you improve the fastest would be to go through the Figure Drawing Fundamentals course. You're shading pretty well and you seem to know quite a lot about hand anatomy. If you strengthen your skills in gesture and structure the shading and anatomy will improve automatically. 5 years ago when I decided I wanted to learn how to draw the figure ( I wanted to learn how to draw Tarzan XD, that's why. I've been a huge fan of Disney's Tarzan since I was a baby :D ), I found Proko's anatomy course. I started taking it but felt like something was missing when i compared my drawings to Stan's, so I went to the figure drawing course instead. I´m so glad I did! It gave me exactly what I wanted!; being able to draw gestural 3-dimensional figures, from imagination. I learned the most important part about drawing Tarzan! I realized that rather than thinking of the figure drawing course being an obstacle in front of the anatomy course, it is more like the Anatomy 1 course. Hope this helps :) Keep up the good work!

Hey, @Lauren F.! Nice work overall! Regarding proportions, the only thing that stands out to me is that the ring finger seems a bit too long in 1, and the middle finger, maybe a bit too short in 4 and 6. You can consider thinking of the alignment between the fingertips as a descending arc from index to pinky - perspective and foreshortening might throw that away sometimes, but at least it’s a good starting point to have as a guide. And concerning shadows: yeah, I agree that the shading didn’t work very well in 5 and 6. Sorry about that! My guess is that perhaps smaller shadow shapes got in your way too soon. When shading, try as much as possible to think of the major primary forms first: simple volumes like spheres, cylinders and boxes can be your reference as a comparison of how the major shading patterns should look like. Only after these big masses have been figured, move on to smaller secondary and tertiary forms; and, throughout the process, refer back to the primary ones in order to check the overall relationships. Have you checked this video yet? Drawing Hands from Imagination – Shading and Details It could help. On the other hand (sorry for the unintended pun 😅), I think the shading worked pretty well in 1 and 4 - in fact, I’d say 4 is the best developed drawing of this group because it has clear form definition, consistent value hierarchy (and good contrasts) and believable anatomy and energy. Even viewing it in a smaller size, we can notice it stands out. If you’re willing to make adjustments to these drawings, I’d suggest taking some time to analyze and elaborate for yourself what works well in 4 that could also be brought to the other drawings - this comparison exercise can be really helpful in figuring out improvements in a group of drawings like this one. Hope this helps! If you have questions, feel free to pop them. Cheers!