#wing tips

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!

Made em myself and oof I am exhausted. I had one animation class in college. Just the one. I can’t do much more than these short cycles (though I am working on some longer ones at the moment).

Disclaimer: these gifs are not a perfect reference for flight, I recommend looking up videos of birds and bats flying in slow motion for better references. These are just meant to be samples of how winged people would need to move their wings and whole bodies a lot more than we usually see in movies and tv. I figured it would work better as a visual in motion as well as a written description.

(Description: a bird winged person and bat winged person flying in a looped gif. They are shown from the side here, with their wing bones highlighted in red.)

It was hard to keep everything consistently sized, but anyway. Heads should stay pretty still, this is called "head tracking" and if a flying creature can’t do this they won’t be able to see straight while they fly. Hips should move a lot when flying, because tails are just as much a part of the motion as wings are. In the case of birds, their tails tend to move opposite to their wings, flaring outwards as well. In the case of bats, their wings are attached to their legs and tail if they have one, so their hips will follow the motion of the wings. (And with bat winged people it’s always a tail because the wing membrane would disrupt the bipedalism otherwise).

Bat wings usually have a deeper downstroke than bird wings, and their finger joints allow for more precise wing shaping in flight, curling upwards close to the body for the upstroke. Bird wings in casual flight will have shallower wing strokes than bat wings, sometimes not even coming all the way up depending on the flight speed. They also keep their wingtips closer to the body on the upstroke. Like how when you’re swimming it’s easier to pull your arm up elbow-first to avoid drag.

Definitely look up specific birds and bats in slow motion if you can, flying is a very complex and nuanced form of movement and I can’t describe every detail of it myself. Wing shape, flight speed, air currents, etc can all affect the way a creature flies.

(Description: same as above, but now the winged people are shown flying towards the viewer, and their wing bones are not highlighted.)

Honestly it’s a little easier to draw normal flight from the front lol it lets me show the movement of the wings better. (Foreshortening wings is freakin tricky and I’ve been working on that for years, it’s so much harder than foreshortening other limbs.) It’s a bit easier to see the bird tail motion here, the way it flares out when it dips down.

(Description: a looped gif of a bird winged person and a bat winged person hovering, shown from the side. There is also an example of how not to hover, depicted by a common trope of a winged person floating vertically in the air with their wings held straight out to the side. Their body kind of bobs up and down while their wings move mainly from the shoulder, looking more like signal flags than actual flapping wings.)

Not all birds and bats can hover and it kind of requires extremely fast flapping, with a very particular motion to it which is hard to depict at any angle. But it’s okay to fudge that a little for the sake of your winged people. The motion is rather circular, wings go out to the side, push down, and then the wrist pushes forward. On the way back up, the wrist folds straight back and the whole wing will fold in super close to the body, then quickly rotate outwards to come back straight out behind the body and repeat. That’s how it works in the best videos of hovering birds I could find, which were kingfishers. I could not locate a video of a bat hovering that was quite as thorough but I gathered that it works in a very similar way.

Except hummingbirds, those are a whole category of their own. I might have to make a specific post on hummingbird wings someday because they are just that unique.

And as seen on the end there, my pet peeve. I see this in live action and cartoons. The weird vertical hover where the person just sorta floats there and moves their wings flatly up and down (or worse, they don’t move their wings at all). This is not a functional way to fly. The wings are not catching any air. They’re going to fall right out of the sky. And what is the point of giving a character wings as an actual body part if you’re just going to depict them magically floating? It’s not nearly as fun.

B E/ A/ M O D E L

When we see pictures or clips of a fashion show; we're seeing a vision inside one’s head coming to life. A vision drawn on paper, to cut patterns, to scrapped rough drafts, to a final walk down a runway of editors and photographers to document these trends. God has called each of His children to be a model, to be a vision or a pattern of His Holy purpose. He has designed us to be a light and a voice for Him to get His message across to others. Let us be mindful to do our best by His strength, to uphold His image. As we walk this journey, there is someone is always watching our example.

“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity” Titus 2:7 

Well firstly here is a website that explains how insect wings work. To sum it up, there are two different forms of flight in insects.

Dragonflies and their relatives use "direct flight" and basically all the other flying insects use "indirect flight". Here are some illustrations from the above website showing the different muscle structures of each type:

(Image description: two simple illustrations of an insect body cross-section that show the wing joints and muscles of direct flight in action. There are two sets of muscles anchored at the belly and attached to the wing joints, with one muscle pulling down on the end of the joint to raise the wing, and the other muscle attached a little higher up to lower the wing. End description.)

(Image description: two simple illustrations of an insect body cross-section that show the wing joints and muscles of indirect flight in action. One main set of muscles anchor at the belly and attach to the back of the thorax, which is jointed at the sides to be raised up and down. A smaller set of muscles in the center flex to raise the back while the main muscles pull it down. The wings move in the opposite direction. End description.)

So direct flight, like dragonflies, is the easier version to adapt to a humanoid torso I think. Just anchor the wings by the shoulder blades and put some extra muscles on the sides to move them.

(Image description: two ink drawings. The first shows the back of a humanoid skeleton with lines to indicate where the insectoid wings are anchored on the shoulderblades. The second shows a humanoid torso with lines to indicate wings and red shapes to show the wing muscles along the side of the torso. End description.)

Indirect flight is how all the other insects work, including butterflies, so if you want to go with that you'll have to do some extra work. Like figuring out how to put a functional back plate on a humanoid body.

(Image description: two ink drawings. One shows a humanoid skeleton with a cartilage back plate between the shoulder blades, as well as lines indicating how the wings are anchored below the plate. The second image shows a humanoid torso with lines to show wing placement, a blue shape where the back plate sits, and red shapes above and below the plate to show where the muscles are that coul raise and lower the plate. End description.)

So that's my two cents on how insectoid wings can be adapted to fit on a humanoid body. I also think the winsg would be made of a very different material to real insect wings, like cartilage frames and keratin surfaces. Insect wings also have a lot of veins running through them, which gives them their stained-glass-window aesthetic.

There are a lot of fun shapes and color patterns you can work with when you draw insectoid wings, so have fun!