Anonymous asked: How the hell do you always manage to draw wings so nicely?

Thank you very much! I know people hate it when artists answer “practice!” to these sorts of questions, but honestly I just practiced wings a lot. I went through a period of time when I realized I had no idea how wings worked (or birds in general, honestly) and spent a lot of time looking and researching and drawing bird wings.

One of the biggest mistakes I always see people do when drawing wings is to leave out a joint. Wings are like arms (really muscular arms, but still arms), they have a shoulder, an elbow, and a wrist. A lot of people like to leave out the elbow for some reason, and that just throws the whole wing off. Draw from reference a lot until you get an understanding of how the wing works. With all the muscle and feathers obscuring the skeletal structure it can be kind of difficult to understand the inner workings of a wing, but just keep at it and don’t just draw what you think a wing looks like.

And while we’re talking about bird anatomy: birds have knees, don’t forget to draw them. The “backwards pointing” thing you see is the bird’s ankle, not it’s knee.

In closing: Birds are weird.