how to draw dragon wings folded

Do you accept any tips or tricks for drawing dragon wings in any folded/half foldes pose? I detect the wing skin folds to be the about difficult thing when drawing dragons, they usually comprehend upwardly half the image and just look wonky when I effort ;w;

Asked by Anonymous

Alright, you're about to see some diagrams that are non 100% biologically accurate merely hopefully they'll illustrate my points. Too, most of this I am basing on bat wings because that's the closest real life reference nosotros have to dragon wings.

OKAY.

First let's talk about what's going on with the edges of the wing membrane. The whole membrane is similar ane giant stretchy piece of spandex. When all the digits are extended the membrane gets stretched taut, just when the fly relaxes the membrane retracts into itself. What does this await like?

The edges pull inward, similar this.

What theydon't do is fold up like a piece of fabric.

The very edge of the membrane often has a tiny ridge. This is acquired past the folding of the skin, too bundles of elastin fibers that nosotros won't go into correct at present! On occasion there volition exist some wrinkles, but they are more often than not on the membranes themselves and don't present themselves much forth the edge.

Check out these wrinkles hither. The pink pointer shows a pretty "large" wrinkle, which is present on the plagiopatagium (membrane between the body and the concluding digit of the fly paw.) This is a very large piece of skin, so if there are going to exist any large wrinkles they volition be here! But even still, it'south not well-nigh every bit extreme as the floppy "fabric" example I drew above.

Here you can come across more wrinkles on the wing surface that don't really limited along the edge nearly equally much as you might expect. All things considered, they're pretty subdued!

This wing is one-half-folded and information technology nevertheless just looks like big smoothen shapes. They have to get pretty darn folded earlier wrinkles start happening. Until then, the edges of the wings are just gentle curved lines. Zippo to worry about!

As for poses, remember that a dragon wing is only like your arm. It has a shoulder, an elbow, a hand, and fingers. They are just actually elongated versions of each. Only like on your manus, the fingers are flexible and can bend at the joints. Here are three quick steps for drawing crazy wing poses:

i. Sketch out the arm and finger parts.

2. Describe a deeply curved line to correspond the edge of the wing membrane (blue.) Also draw curved lines between each pair of duke (pink.) This will help you see where that membrane is going.

3. Erase the parts that are invisible from the viewer'south angle.

This was kind of simply a fast overview. I hope it answered your question, and if it didn't, shoot me another note and I'll endeavour to exist more thorough!