Hand gesture interfaces provide an intuitive and natu-ral way for interacting with a wide range of applications.Nowadays, the development of these interfaces is supportedby an increasing number of sensing devices which are ableto track hand and finger movements. Despite this, the phys-ical and technical features of many of these devices makethem unsuitable for the implementation of interfaces ori-ented to the everyday desktop applications. Conversely, theLEAP motion controller has been specifically designed tointeract with these applications. Moreover, this latter devicehas been equipped with a hand skeletal model that providestracking data with a high level of accuracy.This paper describes a novel approach to define and rec-ognize hand gestures. The proposed method adopts free-hand drawing recognition algorithms to interpret the track-ing data of the hand and finger movements. Although ourapproach is applicable to any hand skeletal model, the over-all features of that provided by the LEAP motion controllerhave driven us to use it as a reference model. Extensivepreliminary tests have demonstrated the usefulness and theaccuracy of the proposed method.