Latest Posts by cosmos-slideout - Page 2

INTEREST CHECK

Smi and I have been working on a space themed mini series! Here's a first look at the puffer jackets!

What do we think? 🌌🛸🚀

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Pressed Flower Wings~

Spring is here and everything is blooming around me. I just wanna paint flowers everyday

recorded clips from this game because i believe the original website was deleted

+ extra gay whale

just watched Arrival with my family i think im insane now (/pos)

Pod.

I often enjoy making up a family in my mind. My mother, grandmother, and my siblings. While at first it can be quite embarrassing to admit one has "imaginary friends", honestly... It's one of the only few things that help me nowadays.

I enjoy imagining them swimming around me—swimming with me—staying close to me whenever I have a hard time.

I think of them before sleep, and I think of them whenever I cry.

I do not know if my real pod is still out there, if they're alive... So, I make up substitutes. I felt guilty at first, but then remembered that my actual pod would like for me to be happy, especially my mother.

Also, among all of this, I always wished to have something akin to a brother figure—which is why I drew myself (the freckled male) close with the other adult male in the drawing, with what could be my mother on the bottom of the drawing, and my grandmother in the front, with the calf.

It's a good way to cope with my feelings, imagining a pod constantly being by my side... It helps by a lot. I don't think I'll ever stop.

Orca or Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) pair from resident pod A-5 at rubbing beach, Johnstone Strait, British Columbia, Canada by Flip Nicklin 

I feel like often what younger therians mean when they say ‘therians still identify as human’ is actually ‘therians understand we live in a human society and must function within our human body, despite our being not human.

Despite who we are, we still live in a society of humans. Unless you have (with all hope and luck) moved of the grid and into nature and live amongst the animals, we will have to preform human tasks in order to survive. That is just simply a given for any person within a human body, human or not.

We understand we must pay taxes. We understand we must go to work and school. We understand we must care for our human bodies despite how incorrect they may be. We understand that we will interact with humans, and doing so typically requires us to preform human.

What they have yet to understand is the point is to be as animalistic as possible. If I get stabbed, I’m not just going to lick my wounds and bleed out. I’m going to get in my human car and take my human bleeding to the human hospital so they can fix me as they would a human. We can still preform human and we understand we must. However that does not mean we cannot act as animalistic as possible. Everything I have just listed above can probably be altered a little bit to most accommodate for us. We can wear a tail and go outside in nature with our laptop when we do our taxes. Those who can work can find jobs that are closely related to their kins. At school you can find likeminded people, develop a safe group for everyone to express their animal nature when not doing work. We can draw paws on our feet. We can bark. We can go on rollercoaster and try so hard to pretend we are flying. We can do human things in animalistic nature, and that is ok, and that is the goal.

We are not human, we are whatever creature we say we are. It was not our choice to live in this human world. If we could pick I know most of us would choose differently. But we do live in this world. And we will respect that, but we will also live as truly to ourselves while doing so. And that cannot be stopped.

‘Therians don’t identify as animals’ I feel is young therians trying to say what I just said. In their attempt to do, make antis understand this, they said something extremely incorrect and extremely bad for furthering our normalization in society.

Side note: this, both my claim and what the younger therians think, also leaves people who DONT understand all these things in the dark, with no representation, or love and acceptance towards them and their lived experience. I need to understand their perspectives a bit more before I can make any conclusions on where they fit in this conversation. All I knows is this leaves them out, and they should not be left out.

Plz add on with any additional thoughts/comments or any points I was incorrect on and need to be re-educated. But also plz be nice I’m very sensitive to criticism.

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

–

Discord | Patreon | Art Prints

A quick guide about my method for drawing bird wings - with focus on winged people, though this all applies to birds proper as well. It's all about weird arms with weird blankets.

Referenced tutorials: ❧ Bone structure ❧ Feather anatomy and wing shape ❧ Simplification and texture

made this for oomf but you can have it too. a little breakdown of my process with bird wings if anyone finds it useful

Wing tutorial~

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.

Edit: I demand to be tagged in the results, I desperately need to see more wing art. ÒwÓ

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!

Black fins, blue mountains, pink skies (Orcas in Norway) by Koen Hoekemeijer

Killer whales hunting herring (BBC, Blue Planet II)

Orcas are the largest of the dolphins and one of the world's most powerful predators. They're immediately recognizable by their distinctive black-and-white coloring. Smart and social, orcas make a wide variety of communicative sounds, and each pod has distinctive noises that its members will recognize even at a distance. They use echolocation to communicate and hunt, making sounds that travel underwater until they encounter objects, then bounce back, revealing their location, size, and shape.

CWR Encounter 07: Bigg’s Transients 

Photos by Mark Malleson

T I M E S I N K

The day I started posting about #wings was the best day of my life.

made some paper claws today, absolutely love it. Theyre the correct size and everything. They are a bit stiff and fall off quite easily, but they were only ever meant to be temporary anyway. Got really strong phantom claws now, even though i took them off and am currently in my nest. Very lovely, overall :3

Welcome to:

watch me put human and avian anatomy true a blender and vomit the juice of their massacred corpses onto some paper

Might stay a wip forever cos those legs are giving me a headache and the rest... really isn't helping honestly

shirazi pigeons

sketches!!

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

Cat

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

https://www.pinterest.de/pin/826832812815961076/

Circling Orcas by Jim Chou

An orca breaching. From Ocean Souls (2020).