Hello, Mods! I finished this picture recently, but I feel like...

Hello, Mods! I finished this picture recently, but I feel like the wings are all off. It was my first real attempt at drawing wings and they just came out the wrong shape and I don’t think the pose of the wings works well with the pose of the character. I’m at a loss Q-Q.

Could I get some help with the wing pose and how to frame my character better in the picture? Because right now I feel like the wings are just ruining the whole thing TT-TT

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Hello, Hello! First off let me say I am in love with this piece and the feathers are looking amazing! They’re a huge pain for us mods to draw  too, so take it from me when I say you did really well on them for your first attempt!

For the wings, there isn’t much wrong beyond some anatomy mistakes! 

(I will work with the pose you have but will post some quick sketches of other poses that could have been done for this image!)

In this piece, the wing’s anatomy turned out a little too bendy in places which can make the character feel a bit unconnected to them but by stiffening them up and dragging the wing top up (on the character’s left wing), it will be a more smooth transition and not so curved at the bend of the wing there.

Going to the bottom of that wing, you can see where there is a hard break of the primary and secondary feathers but in reality that harsh of a break doesn’t happen. Making the primary/secondary’s all the same size (or least transition them into shorter feathers when you reach the secondaries, since there are some birds with longer primaries on edge of the wing that shorten as they get to secondary feathers) and perhaps making the secondaries slightly more spaced out will help cohesion with body and wings.

One last thing on the wings is that when looking at them both, it seems the right wing is actually smaller then the left wing despite being closer to the view so you will want to drop it down slightly to match the left wing size.

I would definitely recommend in the future to making small studies of wing positions from birds next them so you could plan out the human part pose then try the wings to see which best flow with the image. For an image like this, the best wing poses tended to be ones from ones of birds in flight mid flapping wings, diving to grab something (i.e eagles/hawks grabbing fish from water), or even in fight.

Below are some small quick sketches of other winged poses but remember these are fast simple things I do to choose a wing position without paying much attention to anatomy beyond what I see quickly. Once I find a pose I like, I will find multiple pictures close as I can with the pose to draw and study since some birds have longer wings, shorter feathers and more differences!)

Now for framing, you did a very nice job with the background actually! What I could have done is either:

1. Make the image background larger and not so cramped around the wings. Giving the character space to ‘breathe’ so to speak will help not make it seem too busy and feel like you have to look everywhere.

2.Slightly shrink the character and get the foot off the ocean line (as seen in the redline piece). With those two dark colors on each other, they can make it seem to flow to the ocean since you have the guiding point of the figures (dark color on light color which will always gather attention) straight leg to the hard line of the ocean. With the boots being darker then the wings, I would be tempted to dilute the color to not be so strong so the dark colors of the wings will stand out more.

3. Add some clouds! In the example redline I did, we can see I added clouds which help frame the character but also break up that hard line the ocean presents too. (You can also make this mist, or adding ‘wind’ too.)

4.Take the ocean out completely and make it a sky piece. They could be in the sky, falling back to earth or flying high in the clouds!

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