Hey I Was Just Wanting To Ask If You Some Tips On Drawing Slugcat Legs. I Really Want To Be Able To Draw

Hey I was just wanting to ask if you some tips on drawing Slugcat legs. I really want to be able to draw these little cuties and I have everything else done but the legs (specifically poses and action) is really tough for me

It'll depend heavily on how you actually wanna do their legs, but since your asking me I'll assume you like how i do them- I draw them digitigrade when in motion, which basically means that the weight of the animal is carried on the on the toes (the other is plantigrade, which means the back of the foot makes contact with the ground when moving.) This is important since it changes how the leg tends to be formed and rest, but slugcats have a lot of flexibility here.

The other thing to keep in mind is that slugcats are *sleek* and tend to be smooth no matter what pose they're in, so you can hide the specifics of the legs under this and squash and stretch them as you see fit. Think about how fur or feathers tend to hide exactly how the body looks (and thats why so many animals look weird when wet and all that stuff lays flat) As for how I do it, I try to keep slugcats to a tube or triangle shape with most of the weight/fat being in the hips and tail. In most cases, you can get away with just imaging the leg as a flexible ball, and treat the foot as a point (like your pulling on a water balloon). The further the foot from the body, the more that ball stretches. The specifics of whats going *on* in the ball can be hidden unless its its really stretched out

Mentally I don't put much thought into it, but if you need more structure think of the bones of the leg as three sections- the foot, fibula/tibia (Lower leg bones) and femur (Upper leg bone/thigh). Digitigrade and plantigrade tend to favor certain positioning, but ultimately the only major focus is on how the foot functions. Digitigrade in particular tends to favor this sort of 'z' formation even when fully stretched (Humans, in contrast, are plantigrade, and our legs can be fully straighten out even if they still fold the same way). So if your going for that you'll always want to keep a bit of a 'z' shape even if your stretching it waaay out. When at rest, I keep the foot of the slugcat flat. But anytime it's in motion or would be active they shift weight to their toes. You could keep them fully plantigrade, but personally I think digitigrade allows for easier shows of motion and more natural looking action shots with the upright posture if you dont want to stretch the leg out fully. Also i just like the look of it more. (If you want to get into biology more, this would normally be hard on the legs weight-wise, but I like to imagine slugcats are mixed tripedal rather than strict bipeds, and make use of their tails as a third grounding point.)

And heres a very quick run over some of the official cutscenes to show similar:

I personally just wing it when it comes to the sizes of those sections, but a general rule of thumb is that everything gets shorter as you go down- the upper leg has the longest bones, then the middle leg, then the foot. A lot of that is hidden in the body of the slugcat, but keeping that in mind might help keep the leg length feeling natural. (But the biggest secret is that your drawing a fake, stretchy blobby animal so you can bs a lot and be imperfect and honestly just do whatever in a lot of cases and not end up with something that noticeably wrong. This DOES get a little harder if you draw them more lithe or cat like, just because that exposes the leg more) And lastly, if cutscene art isnt helping and you might benefit from a real life reference- rather than using an actual cat I would actually recommend mustelid like a ferret, otter or stoat. They're plantigrade rather than digitigrade, but their form and posturing is a little bit closer to the slugcat and it might help with visualizing the way the legs can sink into the body. I will give a heads up that these are little predators so general search results do tend to show them hunting small animals like mice, if your sensitive to that stick to domestic ferrets for safer results.

Just remember to fatten them up- they're way longer and thinner than slugcats are