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your art is absolutely GORGEOUS omg,, I love the colours and poses and the style. do you have any advice on how to draw wings better? I really struggle with drawing them in more dynamic poses and also closed/half closed, so any help would be much appreciated ^^

Oh absolutely! And ur too sweet for this world, seriously, ur giving me an ego #- -# ur amazing <3

Drawing wings is natural for me, and it’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t exactly see it that way, so bear with me - -*

If we’re starting with anatomy, I would start with bird and bat wing studies, wing shapes and different wing purposes, most if the time

I HEAVILY recommend studying these three studies from YouTube

This is how I learned the basic anatomy and purpose of wings, and what exactly a wing needs to be realistic, because in order to stylize, you need to understand the full picture, just like any other body part.

I recommend thinking of all wings as something to bend, keep all your lines loose and flowy, less jagged. Keep movement in every part of the wing, including the armpit, the elbow, the fingers and the feathers, nothing should have a purely straight line

Make sure the flow line in your wings is as clear as possible, even in flight wings are not ramrod straight, they move with their environment and position, the wind pressures them into new shapes, keep that in mind for when you draw them, they should never be fully stagnant, especially in flight. Feathers and skin bend to the wind, the shape around their bodies, they aren’t flat, they are 3d, keep that in mind

Bird wings are almost always curved, or posed in a curved shape, both on the top and bottom of the wings. Make sure to curve them with the body, make them make sense with the rest of the pose, wings are limbs, they weigh a lot, make sure the pose is balanced with their weight, and with the rest of the body.

Wing shapes are a lot to take in account, make sure to keep each wing shape and purpose in mind in designing the size, length, and width of your wings for your characters, if they are a slow or fast flier, or if they use their wings much at all. This is overwhelming, but I promise it’s worth it to keep in mind.

Of course there are always exceptions to some of these rules, and especially wing shapes, with birds like owls and hummingbirds having especially customized wings to fit their flying style, but most of the time drawing wings will fall into all of these categories.

Once you are able to do a lot of this well, you can post them in lovely shapes!

I love drawing wings, but I’m not the best at explaining my mentality when drawing them, so this is probably entirely convoluted - -*, sorry if this didn’t help at all, but please be honest if it didn’t, I just hope some of the recommended videos can help! Thank you for asking this lovely question! Feel free to ask anything else! I’d I didnt answer your question in a way that is helpful, please ask! I would love to elaborate! Of course, I highly recommend researching this for yourself, they might be a hell of a lot better at helping you than I will be, but I hope some of it translated? - -* I dunno, I suppose we’ll see! Please just ask if you have more questions, I promise I won’t be mad or ignore you! <3

Wing shapes

#Aircraft wings #Wing shapes #wing configurations #aviation

What would be the wing shape of a Penguin?

(Context: Wing Shapes graphic and follow-up ask re: flightless wing shapes)

So unlike other birds, including flightless ones, penguin wings don't gain a secondary shape from their feathers. Penguin feathers are really short and dense, so they match the contour of the wing tightly.

Check out this photo—you can see the light coming through behind the wing, revealing that it's pretty much all flesh. There's only a sliver of feather-without-flesh on the trailing edge.

(Image source © Ben Price)

This shape is a very effective flipper, so all the penguin needs is a layer of insulating and smoothing feathers and it's good to go.

Compare this to the featherless shape of a flighted bird's wing and you'll see it's pretty close:

(Image source)

(Behold, a man.)

Shape diagnosis: In a sense, penguin wings are the MOST bird-shaped because they're closest to the true shape of their flesh. Other birds with their big long-feathered wings are LIARS and FALSE IDOLS. Penguin supremacy.

#ask #anonymous #wing shapes #biology #bird #feathers

My wing shapes infographic is going around again and I love seeing the excited comments on it, but it’s always the old version that takes off 😭 and not just the old version but the old version with a minor illustration error on it

I get why tumblr doesn’t update reblogs when the original post updates but this is a slow torture

(every time you reblog this version an angel OC gets its wings)

#portrait of the artist as a young dork #scientific illustration #wing shapes

With your wing shape post what shape would flightless birds have? (Chickens, ostriches, kiwis, etc) Or do they all have different types?

Chickens aren’t fully flightless but they are so very bad at it, bless their hearts. They have an elliptical wing, the problem is that it’s too small relative to their body, and the corresponding flight muscles are underdeveloped.

To be clear, flightless birds aren’t flightless strictly because of their wings. Most have lost their keel—it’s a little bone growth on the front of the sternum (breastbone) where flight muscles attach. No muscles, no power, especially when the body mass is high as with many flightless birds. So, even if you were to stick proper wings on these guys, they’re not going to be taking off.

With that in mind, no, many flightless birds don’t have a wing shape comparable to flighted birds. Their wings are no longer under selective pressure to be functional for flight and were therefore able to undergo a lot of changes that flighted birds wouldn’t tolerate. Feathers need to be stiff and grow in a certain aerodynamic pattern, but flightless birds have lost or dramatically rearranged feathers, and their feathers are often soft and oddly shaped…and the sum of these effects makes the overall wing shapes weird.

Ostriches, for example, resemble…nothing. Like, look at that. That’s a craft project. They now use their wings for mating rituals and other displays, as well as some general braking/turning assistance while running. (That assistance basically amounts to “fancy rudder” though, and isn’t a particular special shape from what I was able to find.)

(Image source and also a cool article on possible similar wings in dinos)

Their overwing feathers are fairly uniform and soft, the underwing is totally unfeathered, and they’ve gained long feathers on both the leading and trailing edge of the wing, none of which would be allowed to happen in a flighted bird because it’s an aerodynamic disaster. Rheas are like this too. Here is a very viscerally unpleasant picture from the underwing of an ostrich…

(Image source)

Here is all the grandeur of an emu wing.

(Image source) (Thanks @reggiemess and anon for the pic/correction!)

But there are a few cases of recognizable wing shapes. These are all shapes that came from the flighted ancestor; they weren’t developed anew during flightlessness. The species just hasn’t messed too much with the wing pattern, whether that’s due to a recent loss of flight or a neutral/positive selection towards the old feathers.

Kakapos fall into this situation. Kakapos have the chicken problem. That’s a fairly standard wing, but too short for its body mass and with no flight muscles. They’re still good for balance, though.

(Image source)

There’s also a flightless cormorant. No, this bird isn’t sick or molting—this is what their normal feathers look like, and they’re used for swimming and diving. It’s still approximately a normal cormorant wing, they’ve just significantly reduced the feather length and coverage.