Painting hands often causes serious trouble to both professional and amateur artists. The complexity of their build, especially in realism, puts them among the hardest parts of a human body to render properly. When painting realistic hands, two key factors are needed to achieve satisfying results: a thorough knowledge of anatomy, and creative choice of skin tones. Both of these factors have to be perfectly balanced – even the best technique won’t help if you make serious anatomical mistakes; but the knowledge of anatomy alone, not supported by appropriate colour choices, won’t ever yield a realistic result either. Even though both of these elements can only truly be mastered with time, there are some rules and tricks that, once known, will dramatically improve the working process and make an artist’s life much easier. In this workshop I will try to explain and describe those methods, as well as share some tips and hints that might further speed up and ease the hard process of rendering hands. To use the workshop to its fullest, you should own and have a basic knowledge of professional painting software such as Painter and Photoshop and have a tablet available to use. The walkthrough image was completed using Photoshop with some help from Painter, but for your comfort the brush tips will be described for both of these programs simultaneously throughout the whole painting process.