0. Prologue

Greetings, friend. I see, you've decided to draw some wings, but not sure what to start with.

Don't worry, I'll try my best to explain it to you. So, grab your pen and let's roll!

 

*Everything you read in this article is only my personal way of drawing wings. Thus, you can experiment and make your own unique (and maybe even more simple) method (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

1. Feathered wings

・Base structure

It's probably hard to believe, but wings aren't that different from our arms. And I want you to think of wings as just an extra pair of arms. Just look here:

Not so different, right? But, there're still few differences.

While first one is obvious, birds don't have as many fingers, the second one is not. Human's humerus (bone that connects shoulder and elbow) is longer than ulna (forearm):

if human humerus is X cm, ulna will be approximately 0.83*X cm.

In case of birds the ratio is reversed. in this case if bird humerus is X cm, then ulna will be 1.2*X cm.

Of course I'm not expecting you to use ruler for every wing you are drawing (٥⁀▽⁀ ).

Simply memorize that feathered wings have reversed ratio compared to human arm.

Like I said earlier, it's just an extra pair of arms after all.

・Main feather groups

There're many groups of feathers that serve different purposes. But we're not studying ornithology, so I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.

 

Well, this can't be skipped because it's base of our feathered wing drawing:

Primary feathers (blue), Secondary feathers (purple) and Tetrial feathers (green).

 

On average, birds have:

5-7 Tetrials - connected to humerus

6-9 Secondaries - connected to ulna

9-12 Primaries - connected to hand

 

But some birds may have more than 40 feathers, so it's not that important, unless your goal is drawing a specific bird. Just remember that number of feathers grow from tetrials to primaries.

 

For simplicity, you can add 2 feathers per group: 7 Tetrials → 9 Secondaries → 11 Primaries.

And here's how I do it:

Step 1 - Draw lines that will be center of the future feather (feather shafts) on a separate layer and make it ~40% Transparent

Step 2 - Draw first feather on the tip of a hand one another new layer

Step 3 - Copy/Paste the feather I've drawn and align it to a proper place according to shaft lines I've pre-drawn earlier

Step 4 - Since feathers of the wing are placed one over another, next thing I do is erasing every line that should be hidden behind previous feather

If necessary I use "Free Transform" mode to adjust length/width of the feather to make it fit better with the others.

The last thing left to do is adding textures to feathers to make them look more real.

・Feather coverts

Main feathers are covered with extra layers of feathers that are called coverts:

Primary covert - covers primary feather group.

Secondary covert - covers secondary and tetrial feathers.

Marginal covert - covers primary and secondary coverts.

 

This might be not the most logical thing, but after being done with Main feathers, I strongly suggest to draw marginal covert next. I'll explain in a bit, why we're choosing exactly such order.

Marginal covert feathers aren't really long, so I prefer to draw it more fur-like with few really short feathers staying visible.

-------------------------------* I usually draw each group of the feathers in separate layer to minimize amount of errors I can make.

・Finalizing feathered wing

The only thing left to do is erasing overlapping lines (marked Red) from bottom layers.

Voila! The perfect wing is ready.

・Simplified (anime / cartoon) version

But what if we don't want to make such detailed wings from the start (case A) or suddenly decided to change design half-way (case B)? 〣( ºΔº )〣

 

Don't worry, you've done nothing wrong. Eraser will help you with it.

Mmmmmm, my favorite tool... (´﹃｀)

 

A) Even if you don't want to make a really detailed wing, I still suggest to make a simple sketch of main feathers and semi-detailed marginal covert. Then draw main feather's outer shape based on your sketched feathers, then copy them and repeat do same as with detailed, except this time simply shrinking will be enough, because we can simply erase any covert feather that doesn't look to be on it's place.

 

B) Simply remove all the the feather shafts and most of the secondary feathers.

And here's your perfect simple feathered wing. Time to soar to the skies, isn't it?

2. Bat / Dragon / Vampire / Gargoyle wings

・Base Structure

-----------------* I'm showing bones only for human to animal comparison purpose, when you do an actual drawing, you should replace them with simple lines to use as reference for future wing.

The main difference is ratio and length of the fingers.

If bat's humerus size is X cm, then it's ulna will be 1.8*X cm. As for the fingers, they are just long. So you can adjust them as you see fit based on your artwork.

・Finalizing bat-like wing

------------------------* Red dotted lines show the difference of bat wing compared to "fantasy" wings.

 

Bats have their big finger connected to their necks and 5th finger connected to their feet via membranes, while "fantasy" creature wings are connected to their backs.

And that's pretty much everything you need to know to draw bat-like wings. They're much easier to draw, compared to feathered ones.

3. Epilogue

--------------------------I can imagine a mutation that would make possible for wings to grow from humanoid's back (few bone adjustments can allow it : split scapula and additional misshapen cravicle), but I can't find a single explanation for wings growing from head, hips and heels.

 

That's just my personal opinion and preference. ٩(｡•́‿•̀｡)۶

It's entirely up to you, my friend, where you want your wings to grow from.

4. Appendix

Here some quick examples of characters with wings:

If you made it this far, first of all I want to thank you sincerely for that. And I hope that everything I've taught you today was easy to understand and helped you figure out how to draw nice wings for your character.