Guide · Hand shadows

How to make hand shadows

A rabbit, a swan, a wolf and a bird. All four figures come from the manual of the French magician Félicien Trewey, published around 1920, and all you need is a lamp, a wall and your two hands.

What you need

• One small, strong light. A bare lamp, a torch or your phone's flashlight. Diffuse light (a ceiling light, a window) blurs the edges.
• A smooth, light-coloured wall, or a hanging white sheet.
• A dark room. The less light around, the blacker the shadow.

Stand between the light and the wall, with the light at hand height and slightly behind you. The figures are made in profile: what matters is the outline, not what you see from the front.

1. The rabbit

1. With the upper hand, raise your index and middle fingers, slightly apart: these are the ears.
2. Bring your thumb to your ring and little fingers, leaving a small gap between them: this is the eye and the nose.
3. Place the other hand below, crossed at the wrist, fingers stretched forward: these are the legs.
4. Move the ears slowly, one at a time. That is what makes the rabbit look alive.

2. The swan

1. Raise one forearm almost upright: the whole arm is the neck.
2. Bend the wrist forward and bring your fingertips to your thumb; let the index finger stick out a little: this is the beak.
3. Hold the other hand open and flat behind the elbow, fingers together and pointing back: this is the body and tail.
4. Curve the neck and lower the head slowly, as if the swan were drinking.

3. The wolf

1. Hold your hands in profile, one in front of the other, fingers stretched forward: this is the snout.
2. Raise your thumbs, or the bent index and middle fingers of the back hand: these are the ears.
3. Leave a small gap between your fingers, halfway up, for the eye.
4. Lower the little finger of the bottom hand and raise it again: the wolf opens and closes its mouth.

4. The bird

1. Cross your hands at the wrists, palms facing you.
2. Hook your thumbs together: these are the head and neck.
3. Spread the fingers of both hands: these are the wings.
4. Move your hands up and down in a slow flap and glide them across the wall: the bird flies.

Tips for sharper shadows

• Distance. With your hands close to the wall the shadow is small and sharp; close to the light, big and blurry. Find the middle point.
• Gaps matter. An eye is just a space between two fingers. If you cannot see it, open them a millimetre more.
• Move them. A still shadow is a drawing; one that blinks, eats or looks around is a character.
• Practise watching the wall, not your hands. What you see on the wall is what counts.

Who was Félicien Trewey

Félicien Trewey (1848–1920) was a French magician and variety performer. He turned hand shadows, which he called ombromanie, into a music hall act: with a lamp and ten fingers he conjured animals and characters on a sheet.

He was also one of the first to show cinema: in 1896 he presented the Lumière brothers' cinématographe in London, as a friend of the family.

His figures were collected in the manual The Art of Shadowgraphy, now in the public domain. The four drawings in this guide come from it, via the University of Toronto scan on Internet Archive.

The four shadows, on a t-shirt

At Loose Prints we redrew these four figures for an edition of t-shirts: six numbered of each shadow, 24 in total, in white or black.