Peek Through FingersPose Reference
Camera angles
Peek Through Fingers hides the face behind both hands, palms on the cheeks and spread fingers over the eyes, with the elbows tucked together.
Tags: upper bodyhand gesturehands on faceshypeeking
How to draw the Peek Through Fingers pose
three-quarter view 
side view 
back view 
high-angle view
Everything folds inward. Both forearms stand upright side by side in front of the chest, close enough that the elbows nearly touch below the sternum. The hands open over the face with the wrists bent back slightly, palms against the cheeks, thumbs lying along the jaw and the four fingers loosely spread and softly curved upward over the eyes and brow. The spacing matters: gaps between the index and middle fingers are where the eyes would peek out. The shoulders roll forward and hunch, the upper back rounds a little, and the head bows into the hands rather than pulling away from them. Below the frame the legs simply stand relaxed, giving the upper body all of the expression.
Start with the two forearms as parallel columns; they cover most of the torso from the front and form the main silhouette. Then fan the fingers out like two open hands of cards, overlapping the oval of the head. Because the palms are cupped around the cheeks, the hands are boxes bent around a sphere, and the fingertips should curve back toward the forehead. The high-angle view looks down on the crown of the bowed head framed by the fingers, the side view from the figure's left shows how far in front of the chest the forearm column sits, and the low angle shows the undersides of the forearms meeting at the elbows.
More on angles and common mistakes
The most common mistake is flaring the elbows wide into an open triangle, which reads as a headache or crying rather than shyness. Fingers pressed tightly together kill the peek, and an upright head looks posed instead of bashful. This peeking through fingers pose is useful for shy characters, horror-movie scenes, embarrassed reactions, surprise reveals and chibi stickers.
In Edit this pose, lower the left hand a few centimetres down the cheek and widen the gap between its index and middle fingers so one eye clearly peeks out while the right hand stays in place.
Free to use (CC0). The pose images on this page are released under CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). Use them for drawing practice, commercial illustration, reference sheets or AI image generation; no attribution is required. A credit to PoseMaker is appreciated but optional.
Peek Through Fingers pose prompt
Copy a prompt for your AI image generator. Pair it with the OpenPose skeleton in ControlNet so the generated character matches this exact pose.
General prompt
Waist-up view of a shy person hiding the face behind both hands, palms on the cheeks and spread fingers over the eyes with gaps to peek through, forearms upright and elbows close together in front of the chest, shoulders hunched, head slightly bowed, plain background.
Midjourney
upper body, shy person peeking through spread fingers, both hands over face, palms on cheeks, elbows tucked together, forearms upright in front of chest, hunched shoulders, head bowed, plain background --ar 4:5 --style raw
Stable Diffusion
1person, upper body, peeking through fingers, covering face, hands on own face, spread fingers, elbows together, forearms together, hunched shoulders, head down, shy, embarrassed, front view, plain background, simple background, natural proportions
Negative prompt
elbows flared, wide arms, fingers closed, face fully covered, hands on forehead, crying, head upright, wrong finger count, fused fingers, extra fingers, extra arms, hands through face, bad anatomy, deformed hands, blurry, nsfw
OpenPose skeleton for ControlNet
Load the PNG into a ControlNet OpenPose unit (preprocessor: none), or import the JSON into an OpenPose editor.
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