drawing tips and tricks.

fifteen | dragon anatomy

question: how do you do anatomy?
asked by: vexhxzard-

i have a few good references in the fullbody chapter, and since i have an image limit, i'm not going to post them again lol

but really anatomy is all about studying real-life animals and incorporating it into your mythical creatures! there's not much i can teach you, because i literally just look at pics of animals and base my dragons' muscles off of them.
your science teacher would be better for this lol

here's a list of some animals i use:
- horses (particularly the more muscular ones)
- big cats
- large dogs
- birds/bats (for wing anatomy)
- dinosaurs
- humans (for eyes)
- goats/sheep (for eyes and horns)
- cattle/other bovines (for muscles, sometimes horns)
- lizards/crocs/snakes/tuataras/any reptile
- and of course butterflies and other insects

here's another good reference that i found recently:

(by an artist on tumblr)

so i'm actually not going to do a step-by-step tutorial for this one, and instead just give ya a few different tips.

i'm really just going to focus on pyrrhian wof dragons, because pantala tribes... *shivers* they're anatomy messes-

i'm going to go over muscles first.
most animals have the same muscles, but some muscles have different functions.
dragons are weird, however, because they're hexapods (an animal with six limbs/legs)
what? wof dragons don't have six legs!
well. in science, they count wings as legs:
"Bat wings are modified tetrapod forelimbs. Because bats are mammals, the skeletal structures in their wings are morphologically homologous to the skeletal components found in other tetrapod forelimbs." - wikipedia
so basically what they're saying is that since bat wings have the same bones as a normal mammal leg, they're counted as a "modified foreleg."
but bats are tetrapods (four-limbed).
so how do we connect wings to the body while still giving support?
because this:

doesn't allow the dragon to actually support its wings- let alone support the entire body weight with them! so there's really no way that this dragon could actually fly.
i mean, look at that! there's literally not a single muscle for the wings. that little shoulder lump is a joint!
compared to those fat lil legs, the wing arm is a STICK.

so i'm going to reference my favorite drawing book ever- "The Science of Creature design" by Terryl Whitlatch. (she's the creator of the star wars beasts- literally the one who designed Jabba the Hut and Jar Jar Binks! i highly recommend getting this book, even though it's kinda expensive)

(this is a drawing of a blue-footed booby ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) )
but do you see how much thicker the wing arm is than the leg?
but since dragons are not only aerial creatures, they walk on land much more than a blue footed booby. so their legs will probably be as thick as their wing arms.

tails should probably be longish because they provide some much-needed support while flying. (osprey was a good example of this- he was the old dragon with the paralyzed tail that died in the first book)

uhh i'm not really sure what else there is, so here's this gif that can also help:

this dragon is tribeless, but really with a few tweaks to the design, you can make it into any tribe!

sorry that this wasn't a lot but..
hope this helped!
- brie