Eris's Art!

I am such a huge horse nerd and I apologize. :( But I’m really tired of seeing girths that are halfway down a horse’s stomach. This may not be interesting to anyone who is not me, but I like to draw fancy saddles and ridiculously long shanks on bits. Also, horses are the only animal I can draw, so I take advantage of that.

“[Aziraphale’s and Crowley’s wings] were created for Season 1, but we redid them as they needed more complex behavior. The wings were animated to follow Crowley’s and Aziraphale’s body movements to enhance their emotions. So, there was a bit more animation work involved with this. It was more complex in the way that feathers behaved since we had to have proper feather interactions. That was the biggest sequence for sure in terms of volume and complexity. It was a fun and challenging sequence.”

Since it has been asked, I made a little breakdown on how to draw wings.

So, first thing to understand is wing anatomy. I used a swan wing as reference for my artwork. Divide the wing into blocks of feathers. There's sort of three layers to the feathers outlined in the second picture, and these divided along the top joint of the wing where it folds. See the second image. Make sure you bring in these nice, flowy shapes here!

Now that you have these big shapes, you can cut into them and make the individual shapes of the primary and secondary feathers (layer 3.) also make sure they overlap correctly depending on if you are drawing the wing from the front or the back. make sure you stick with a nice rythm and have the feathers get gradually bigger as you get closer to the tip. Like this:

when you go ahead and draw that layer 2 of coverts, make sure that every feather you drew for the bottom layer has (approximately) a feather overlapping it (so you have pretty much the same number of feathers in each layer) and that they line up nicely. But you can also make them a bit more ruffled. Like this:

Other than the flight feathers, the very top part of the wing is very smooth, with shorter, more rounded feathers (almost half-circles!). They can lie very flat or also look a lot more fluffy. think of them almost like overlapping scales. There is also the Alula at the top of the wing, a sort of extra feathery bit that sticks out over the primaries. also don't forget the scapulars which cover over the shoulder blade and are on top when the wing is folded. The Scapulars also have two layers of feathers. (see first graphic).

From there, it's only a matter of lineart and shading or however you want to finish your artwork. Hope this helps with the structure! Drawing wings folded together is a whole other story that I'm not going to get into here... lol.

TL:DR: understand the structure of wings and use references to get it right, work from big shapes to small shapes.

Thanks so much! I had been meaning to answer this ask visually when I wasn’t half asleep or buried under work, but I felt bad for delaying so long. So I hope a quick sleepy tablet scribble will suffice:

Yeah, getting those feathers to face the correct way is important, as well as knowing the outer portion of the wing folds under when not in use.

Aside from that, hoard reference photos! All of them! Draw from them as often as you can, I’d recommend drawing from photos of white “clean feathered” birds like waterfowl or gulls, terns etc. for a start, since their feathers are more hard edged and it’s easier to see what’s actually going on. Owls are… yeah. Hard. Don’t start there, start with swan wings! Much better.