Drawing hands - creating expressions

I haven't been totally unaware of it, but I'm afraid I also earlier haven't fully realized it either - the significant role of hands when creating expressions in illustrations. All this especially when drawing in cartoon style.

In my current project I've been illustrating a lot of characters, which need to be as vivid and characteristic as possible. One of the characters is wearing a woolly hat covering his eyes. As the eyes have an important role in creating expressions, I have now had to do it some other way. And that's when the hands come in.

Here is a set of hands I've sketched for those characters. Basically it seems to be the angles - on wrists and fingers - that need to be exaggerated.


And now, seeing these hands cut apart from the bodies, they seem to be like loose sentences out of the original context. They seem to have lost their meaning.