Made This For Oomf But You Can Have It Too. A Little Breakdown Of My Process With Bird Wings If Anyone

An orca (Orcinus orca) breaches off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, USA

by Guy Schmickle

Let’s Draw Wings

I’ve gotten the question/request of how I draw wings lots and lots so I’ve decided to make a dedicated post!

Now…I’m no master, but I have found a way that I like to draw wings that’s efficient for me. There three main points: 

References

Simplification

Texture Management

First of all - References

My favorite wing reference of all time is this post by Jenn on Twitter. I have both the images saved but I use the Wing Shapes one, below, alllllll the time. Like for real all the time!

I also keep pretty extensive collections of wing photo reference. When I’m having trouble, I’ll trace a few or do studies to get back into the swing of things. Here are links to my Pinterest boards:

Broadwing Reference (passive soaring and high-speed)

Longwing Reference (active soaring)

Shortwing Reference (elliptical and hovering)

Secondly - Simplification

When I sketch wings, I simplify Jenn’s diagram even further -

For me, the key to drawing wings is simplifying the wing down - from the structure to the feathers - the goal for me is to be able to draw them quickly and have the proper information conveyed. It needs to look like a wing in the base sketch. If it doesn’t, no amount of rendering and extra feathers will help. I like to break the wing into the three main moving parts. The orange is one part, then the purple contains two main chunks feathers that you can group together and move as their own parts. 

On top of that, I like to think of wings like a sheet of paper. They can bend and fold in on themselves, with the orange meaty bits anchoring everything together. 

Lastly - Texture

I like to call wings “texture monsters”. Feathers are hard to manage and can easily make wings look over-busy and muddy. Just like before, I break the wing into chunks so I can spend less time drawing the wing and it’s feathers:

Then you can put it all together and push things further -

So yeah this is how I throw wings together! The wings I draw aren’t super technical or detailed, but I what matters for me is that they look and feel like believable wings at a glance -

~ Larn

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Orca. Filmed in Norway. From The Norwegian Fjords: Life in the Twilights (2018).

i have a nest :3 i love my nest :3

Hi! Do you have any tips for drawing people with wings? The main character of my comic has wings, but i… can’t draw them. This is becoming an itty bitty (read: massive) problem. Any help helps at this point honestly haha

I'll share some pictures I find useful.

Here's a bad picture of using the basic shapes for the wings

And then you can see how I used that as the base to tell me where to put feathers

The trick with wings is not to get TOO detailed (IMO). You don't want to make the picture so busy you can't take it in but, mainly, you may be miserable drawing allll the feathers. That's how I approach it. Some people do all the feathers and add more details and it looks great!

For putting them on people, you can see from the back that it's sort of like putting a pair of arms on the shoulder blades. Yes, technically that wouldn't work sooper well, but none of this works when you think about it lol.

You can also check my wings tag, which has a lot of references.

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any more questions!

🦈🐋⭐️

i got bored in the mist of trying to sleep last night- finished coloring and shading this morning ehjdhjd i want waffles

CWR Encounter 07: Bigg’s Transients 

Photos by Mark Malleson