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This is the only tiktok you’ll ever need, I’ve made about 13 of these and I’m not stopping anytime soon

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🇺🇸if you are planning on voting in person, and you sometimes use a mobility aid, BRING IT WITH YOU. the lines are historically long. if you do not have a mobility aid, consider bringing something like a folding stool.🇺🇸

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scuze me i wanna learn to sketch creatures like you do, how would I go about learning that?

Draw from life! Here’s my tips on drawing horses

For other creatures.. well... The one thing that isn’t a tip is just that I grew up obsessed with drawing animals. I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pencil, but only started drawing humans five years ago when I was 20 (which is a WHOLE other story) 

The thing that helped the most was studying bones, so if you have access to skulls/skeletons or replicas, get some. Pictures are cool but nothing beats holding the real thing. You can also study 3d models in the calacademy skull gallery  

Ok I deleted a page and a half of rambling to get to the Big Tip. There’s something that bothers me a lot in creature design, which I will call “splicing”

Splicing vs blending! Using this handy Minotaur who volunteered his time for us

This is spliced! It’s just an animal head on a human body. Sometimes I will splice things like this but only if it makes sense in the story. My manticores are spliced rather than blended because in my head they’re more of a cursed/magicked mash of creatures than something that developed on its own.

Manny here is going to get another piece spliced on

I chopped off his legs and put bull ones in their place. This adds a little more cohesion and I see it as more believable and less “magical accident.” I don’t like stopping here but I see a lot of horny furries that prefer this, so it definitely has its applications. This is still thoroughly spliced with just two cuts between the two lifeforms.

Here’s where things get less Spliced and more Blended. In a blender, everything gets mixed together and spit out in a smooth concoction. This blender gave him fur all over instead of just on the bull parts. I also changed up his hands and gave him hoof-fingers, but not just straight up bull-feet-for-hands. This is pretty good but still solidly a furry.

This is much closer to blend than splice, now. This is definitely not cow limbs grafted onto a human. The Minotaur was not a human with a bull glued to him, but he was conceived, carried, and born as a half human, half bovine child. His mother was a human and his sire was a bull and his origin was greek mythology so things tend to get Messed Up. Hybridizing animal species/breeds is generally not “Copy of one parent with the body part the other” with the exception of corgi crosses.

Shoulders are one of the last things I see people changing on the splice to blend scale, but it really adds SO much monsterness to your designs. Plus, with lower more animal shoulders, Manny can drop on all fours and sprint more comfortably than Hu-Manny.

While the minotaur is literally described as “head and tail of a bull on the body of a man” I don’t see why that has to be the end of it. Describing a creature with all the detail and care of a field guide is not terribly important when it’s trying to kill you. Bull-man is enough for a warning. Blended, this guy looks a lot more monstery and I can see it charging headfirst to impale me, which is what really counts here.

Now there’s a monster boy! I actually drew this one second after drawing splice stage 1, and can you tell which one was faster, easier, and more fun?

My process is not to slowly add creature parts like above, but to blend them up in my head and put them on the page already blended. But I have a lot of practice so that comes more easily to me!

This doesn’t only work on human + animal, but on any number of combinations with any number of ingredients. Let’s take the fabled Questing Beast, an Arthurian legend from the middle ages described as having

“the head and neck of a snake, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion, and the feet of a hart [deer]”

Here’s a spliced version where I cut and glued animals together

This is definitely fun but it doesn’t look like an actual animal, its very obviously a mashed creature. Trying to run with hooves AND paws? Is it predator or prey? Whats with all the clashing patterns?

So let’s turn this splice into a blend. Giving it deer hooves on all four feet because we need some dangerous hoofed animals. The head and neck is gonna be a hybrid of snake and deer with added spots. In fact let’s hybrid the spots themselves to look more like the snake pattern, but spotted and furred all over. The lion haunches are cool but we’ll just take their powerful muscles and keep the lion tail, but put some spots on it. Finally, we’ll make the legs really long so the snake neck doesn’t look out of proportion. Might as well add some little yearling antler nubs from the deer and give it a tiny mane from a juvenile lion.

Now we have a blended Questing Beast

Doesn’t that look nicer and more cohesive? You could even believe it’s a real animal if it wasn’t so absurd.

Spliced creature design is valid and has its place, but to me it always adds an element of uncanny unnaturalness, which is great as a story element!

So have fun! Splice, blend, and invent your own techniques! Try a lot of variety and you’ll eventually find a style that speaks to you.

Creature Design | Patreon | Ko-fi

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Hello! do you have any tips on how you do your character/creature designs? I love all your designs so much their all so cool especially your jackalope/rabbit oc! Love them^^ I would love to hear how you come up with the designs! (I’m planning to make a game and big spooky animal creatures are a big aspect n I wanna do it as best as I can so uh yeah like I said you got any tips?👀✨)

Creature design masterpost

I have been making a BUNCH of tutorials and tips about this and many other topics so check them out!

Yeah! My biggest tip is understanding Splice vs Blend techniques, <- I go into a LOT of detail on getting a cohesive creature here.

It's pretty clear visually here, but splicing is cutting and pasting animal parts together with no or minimum blending at the edges. Classic and real life genetic chimeras are splices of two organisms, and their boundary is very clear. It looks really unnatural. Hybrid animals and mixed breeds shuffle traits all over, so learn from nature to make things natural.

and then consider what traits you add and ask "how did this manage to evolve?" why do they have glowing eyes? Is it for communication? intimidation? warning of poison content?

What adaptions did they develop to best take advantage of their niche/biome? What was the process like? What did the intermediate stages look like and how did they function?

Make something cohesive, give thought to "how is it going to hold up its own weight?" how does it fight? Even rabbits have tools for fighting, and they're built for running and fleeing above all else.

How does it communicate? How would its body adapt to that?

These are all important aspects of Worldbuilding

Don't forget that animals will have instincts and behaviors, while sentient creatures will have Culture. A HUGE thing I see is people giving sentient creatures normal paws but somehow using and building tools? You gotta adapt that sort of stuff dude. They dont needs hands if you can come up with an alternate method of fine motor skills (prehensile trunk, tail, tentacles, weird teeth, an extra set of limbs just for manipulating things, etc) if your creature physically cannot hold and build a knife, they have no business wielding it.

If you cant draw them crafting something, don't draw them using it unless they got it from someone else.

But don't get too carried away with fancy digits you forget the primary purpose of limbs: locomotion and weight bearing.

Here is an unfortunate dragon where I picked my favorite traits and put them together. I also added vestigial arms for some reason and now I have to explain why they're like that. The same goes for any other Just Cause trait you wanna slap on. His name is Dinkus

he's got some problems and you can kinda feel it just looking at him, but it will help you way more to name them. Every part of your creature should influence every other part. A horse has a strong neck and strong haunches because its a domino effect. Let's make this guy hefty

Though a biped would be Possible, it would just look like a t-rex, so I brought the wings down and reverted them to load-bearing legs. But because they used to be wings with long fingers, I'm having her walk on her knuckles because shortening the bat fingers takes a Long time and if evolution finds a shortcut, it will exploit it. But that's a flightless creature so is it really a dragon?

There's dinkus turned in the other direction. I wanted them to fly and so all their adaptions are for that. I also wanted that funky head and made up a reason for it to be that way. You might automatically have this small dragon hunting lizards and rats and such, but if you consider their physiology for a moment, their diet, you just expanded your world and filled out the vulture niche without even trying.

BE CAREFUL THOUGH!

While you cant worldbuild too much, you can infodump too much. So once you have everything built, you need to ask yourself what is appropriate for your project. If it's a dramatic story, you do not need to pause the battle to describe how the buzzard-dragons that are waiting to feast evolved. Just show them off, in writing or visually, and let the audience infer how they evolved and what their behavior is like form their anatomy.

Some people (me) want to engage in the worldbuilding details and get into the nitty gritty of biology/textiles/trade/politics/culture/etc but most audiences are here to be entertained. If you have dragons instead of vultures, a few people will go THAT'S SO COOL but most of them won't even notice... consciously.

Worldbuilding makes a world more believable and immersive. By having dragons eat the dead of war, you remind the reader that this is Not earth, but rather a place that is so whole and complete you know who is going to clean up the roadkilled jackalope stinking up the cobblestone.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuutt....

If you want to create a national geographic journal (which is what I'm doing) and your audience wants it too? (or if you dont care what your audience wants you do this for YOU) Go for it! roll around in details. daydream and doodle new ones. Go crazy go stupid go have fun

OH YEAH! And the biggest tip of all is study nature!

Try to guess what developed and why. How stuff is used, and then you can turn around and put both form and function into your own creatures.

Almost forgot: I clean, document, photograph, and assemble animal skeletons/skulls as a hobby. soooooo that helps me study Real Good.

Play games, make up challenges, and then make it harder

Studying what exists is the best way to create what doesn't. Study work you like, study my work and see what choices I made and ask yourself "why did he use THAT trait?"

Speaking of my work

I believe that in a perfect world, knowledge, especially art knowledge, should be free.

But it's not a perfect world and sadly I need money, so if you found this useful please consider pledging to my patreon or kofi!

[fabicat]

I forgot I have to be active here so here’s my Twitter tutorial on how to draw folds I made a while back to help a friend!

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i watched one (1) video on how to draw hands that changed my life forever. like. i can suddenly draw hands again

these were all drawn without reference btw. i can just. Understand Hands now (for the most part, im sure theres definitely inaccuracies). im a little baffled

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tweet

Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.

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Blue’s Feathers and Wings Compendium: Standard Wing Shapes

Wings Part 1 [Standard ]| Wings Part 2 [Atypical] | Feather Markings | Tail Feathers [Part 1] | Tail Feathers [Part2]

I have expanded the traditional 4 types; Highspeed, Elliptical, Low Aspect and High Aspect ratio, because they were very narrow and vague categories for the most part, adding High Energy, Thermal Soaring, Night Glider, and Passerine wings. I feel that these extra types make it easier to understand and visualize the differences and similarities between wing shapes.

I’ve renamed Low Aspect to Powered Soaring, and High Aspect to Dynamic Soaring for the purposes of the fact that names made it hard to understand purpose and were easily confusable. 

A lot of these wing types are also affected by tailfeather shape and size, and that will change their agility and energy expenditure as the tail also generates lift.

Disclaimer: This is in no way intended to be an academic dissertation or proposal, do not treat it as such. It is purely for art and writing references for others, to aid description and inspiration.

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Cleaning up my files and forgot that I had all these wing studies from circa. 2015 so thought, y’know what, I don’t need to hold onto these, so have this as a little gift from me to whomst ever needs some quick wings for their OC’s, AU’s, and Art.

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I made an art/anatomy tutorial about birds! I hope people will find it helpful!

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That ol’ chart of mine makes the rounds online periodically and it drives me crazy because it’s frankly not very good. So, I finally got around to remaking it.

I doubt this will get anywhere near as popular, but I wanted to make it.

Good reference for animation, comics, and for visualizing phonetics!

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Ethan and Ravenno are OCs by @ravennowithtea

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Does anyone know good photos or reference sources to draw people with wheelchairs or canes?

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Uri is an OC by @comikbook

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I compiled this a while ago but I was just looking for references and found the file so...

Best places to find reference photos:

Body types, poses, and anatomy:

http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en

https://www.posemaniacs.com/

https://quickposes.com/en

https://www.characterdesigns.com/#home-section

https://www.adorkastock.com/sketch/

https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/

https://www.proko.com/browse/tools?af=242

Giant anatomy reference tutorials Pinterest board:

https://www.pinterest.com/deedee1232/body-reference/

General:

https://unsplash.com/

https://pixabay.com/

https://www.pexels.com/

https://stocksnap.io/

https://www.freeimages.com/

https://kaboompics.com/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://morguefile.com/

https://www.flickr.com/

https://www.dreamstime.com/

https://pmp-art.com/

https://www.freepik.com/

https://photobash.co/

https://picjumbo.com/

https://burst.shopify.com/

https://magdeleine.co/

https://wordpress.org/openverse/

Historical:

https://nos.twnsnd.co/

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Rory is an OC by @crowgutzzz

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hey these are some tips for some of the little details in drawing fat folks that some people might not know!

everyone has fat on their bodies so its a worthwhile skill to have, but most art tutorials leave it out. heres some other good tips from artists!!