How exactly would you picture or draw where wings connect onto the body? Like i mean the skin-to-skin connection, not where they are placed on the back.
Everyone goes about this a little differently depending on what you like and prefer as an artist. I’m not going to say “you should do it this way and only this way,” because that’s stupid and may not be what you find you prefer.
I’d rather give inspiration than orders, but ay:
Personally I try to draw it so that the feathers form a gradient across the skin, running up to the nape of the neck to meet the hairline with smaller quills across the shoulders and down the spine, so as to make them not look as though they’re just stuck on like accessories. Trying to get some uniformity and cohesion between wing and body is important because unless they’re magically conjured with the ability to disappear or reappear at will, then they’re going to be and act as an arm, so linking the two with a bridge of feathers helps.
Not adding any feathers around where the wing-arm meets back and having this jarring baldness just pisses me off,especially when they have no feathers below and you end up with a dolphin flipper for a wing. It’s usually just: Human- BOOM- Wing, and nothing else around it to show that they belong as part of the person. So i try to not do that.
Treating them as a mirror to arms is good. The arm does something and the wing matches the movement helps establish it as a limb and how it behaves. If you have a character who’s had wings their entire life then they’re gonna have little quirks and movement to it, maybe even the feathers move and rouse with emotions or fall out and create bald patches when stressed.
Drawing various stretching poses like this is a good way of figuring out how to draw that connection point between wing and body, as well as helping practising the anatomy of it all too. Cutting them off can also be good practice to figuring out feathers and wing-to-back connection too even if it can look sinister and dark but eh.
But if we’re talking featherless bare skin then I just draw them the same as if I were drawing an arm. Just more big bald and chickeny with little goosebump pin feathers.
I hope some of this gives you thoughts c:
