Hand gestures (not static or fixed positions) are movements of fingers and the arm to communicate messages. Hand gesture recognition is the process of identifying meaningful expressions involving the human hand. Pictorial representation of gestures will enable to understand human computer interaction (HCI). This paper describes a system using convolution neural network (CNN) for recognizing the 26 letters of the English alphabet signaled with hand gestures. A Python program was developed to recognize the gestures made in front of a web camera. The hand gestures obtained are categorized using CNN with a trained model. The model was constructed using 1,100 gestures images. The recognition rate was obtained with 91% of accuracy. The proposed method was found to be highly efficient in distinguishing and classifying gestures.