Paper Skeleton Hand

This project is a sculpture of a skeleton hand with a hand shadow. It is made completely with paper and craft glue or a glue stick.

I was inspired by my love of life in death and 3d crafting. I wanted to show the beauty of nature and the human body.

1. printer paper (or any color) about 2 sheets
2. back paper (or any color) 1 sheet
3. frame (optional)
4. glue- I used a glue stick
5. pencil
6. scissors

Place a hand flat on the printer paper (or whatever paper you are using instead of printer paper) and trace it with a pencil. This will be for the black hand "shadow". You could use any position for this as long as you can trace it but i decided in a simple spread out hand. be sure to include a small part of the wrist in the tracing.

Carefully puncture a hole in the middle of the tracing and cut out the hand leaving about 2 or 3 inches of the wrist uncut.

Glue the paper with the cut out hand to a piece of black paper(or whichever color you are using instead of black). DO NOT GLUE THE WRIST DOWN! Do not put glue on the uncut wrist area!

Next is to make all the finger bone segments. cut out rectangles about 1inch wide and put a little glue along the length of the rectangle piece. Use a pencil to roll the paper lengthwise. This will give you the right "tightness" of roll and will make it easier to roll up.

Note that I did not include measurements or lengths for the bones because everyone's hand size is different so the bone size will be different. If you would like a picture of where the finger bones are in a hand I recommend looking up a diagram of the bones in a hand online and using a pencil to mark on the hand you cut out where it looks like the bones might be for your hand. It does not have to be perfect! My fingers ended up being a little longer than on my actual hand.

I did not include a diagram from the internet due to copyright.

Once the glue has dried, take the tube and cut a notch about 1cm on either side near the rolled flap. Make sure the notches line up with each other. Cut flaps out of the notches a little less than half way around the tube (see photos).

Fold the flaps into a rounded shape on each side. Glue the folds down so that it stays rounded. Let dry.

Repeat steps 4-6 till you have three round tube pieces for each finger and two for the thumb. Remember to refer back to a diagram to get as close to the right lengths as possible for each bone segment. keep each finger's bones in separate piles as you continue with the project so they don't get mixed up.

As you might have noticed, the tip bone of the fingers and thumb looks slightly different from the other finger bones. To make these tip bones make a tube as in step 4. These bones are usually shorter than the tube bones so be sure to keep sizing in mind. Once you have your dried tube, fold one opening closed, gluing it down. Then take the sides and fold them in to form a point at the end. Glue the folds down. For the other side, cut a small slit (not a flap) and fold the sides of the slit to the sides and under so they are hidden. Then take the un-folded edge and fold it in on itself till just rounded, gluing the folds down as you go. This will give it a similar rounded look as the tube bone ends.

Repeat for all fingers and thumb for a total of 5.

Next for the palm bones, or carpals. use the photo above of my pieces or search up a hand bone diagram to get the right shape and size compared to the other bones. To make the palm bones, choose one of the bones to make, take a small piece of printer paper; it doesn't matter the shape, maybe 1 by 2 inch; glue one side, and fold it into a miniature version of the shape of bone you are making. Then take another small piece of paper with glue on one side and place the folded paper folds-down onto the new one. Wrap the new paper around the folded one. Continue this process until it is the size you need and about 1/4inch thick.

Your bone piece might have morphed slightly throughout all the layering. If you do this without letting the glue dry between layers, you can take your wrapped bone and use a hard surface (I used the table I was working on) to press the bone back into shape.

Repeat technique for all palm bones.

Now that all the hand bones are done, we need to attach them. To do this, take thin, small strips of paper as pictured and use them as linkers. glue half of a strip to the underside of a finger bone and the other half to the correct connecting bone.

Continue till all fingers and thumb are assembled.

Next we need to assemble the palm bones. I did this with attaching strips of paper at the bottoms of the bones similar to how the fingers were assembled. Refer back to a diagram or my finished product photo to get the piece order and location correct.

If you look at your actual hand, you might notice that the back of your palm is very slightly curved. because of this, once all your palm bones are assembled and partly dried, gently bend the side bones into a slightly curved shape. Then take more paper strips or just small pieces of paper, and glue them to the bottom of the palm bones while holding the bent shape. This will act as a tape to hold the angle of the bones and preserve the rounded shape.

To further preserve the shaping, you can also glue the edges of the palm bone together where they touch. It is ok if the bones overlap slightly, mine did and it can give a little more surface area to glue the bone edges together.

To finish off the hand construction, all we need to do is use yet more paper strips like the small ones used for the finger bone segments. find which fingers connect to which palm bones and glue the strips to attach. Let each finger dry before moving on to the next.

Something to take into account is that the thumb is attached sideways If you look at your own hand you can see it naturally rests at an angle. Make sure to glue the thumb in a way that it rests on its side.

Congratulation! You finished your skeleton hand! All that's left is to assemble and glue it into position on the hand cutout!

Take the paper with the hand cut out that we made in step 3. Cut the wrist bones (tips of the radius and ulna) out. As in the photos, they should look like sausage or hotdog halves and be just long enough to overlap the palm bones if you line up your skeleton hand with the cutout. Leave some extra room for folding and gluing.

Although in the final product photo you cant see it, I left about a centimeter at the edge of the wrist paper that I left to make the paper look like it was morphing into the hand. This is completely optional and if you decide you don't want that feature you can simply cut out the whole wrist and cut out the hotdog halves separately.

Once your hotdog halve have been cut out, fold the round ends to make it slightly thicker and the make it more 3d looking.

Glue the cm of uncut wrist area down or, if you didn't leave that area and cut everything out, just glue the un-folded edges to the edge of the paper wrist cutout.

Glue the folded end of the wrist hotdogs to the bottom side of the palm bones as pictured above.

The last thing left to do is position your skeleton hand. you can do and position you want. I chose a casual half-bent position.

Once you have decided on a position, glue down your fingers. you should only need to have to glue the very tips down but if you have done a position like a fist then you might need to glue more.

The pinkie finger on my skeleton hand was at a pretty sharp angle, leaving not much surface area for the glue to work. To fix this you can the small strips of paper, bend them in half, and glue one end to the finger tip and the other half flat on the paper in the spot you need.

As mentioned in step 11, the thumb rests on its side, so, depending on your position, your thumb will likely be glued down with the side of the end tip bone on the paper.

Once dry, you can now frame it if you would like, just don't include the glass.

That's it! Thank you for looking at my project and/or making it!