How To Draw Wings On A Human

aa ofc!! im not great at explaining things but i really do love drawing wings so i'll do my best!! (this is long as fuuuck so it's going under a readmore)

so the trickiest thing about wings is, imo getting them to work with human anatomy in at least a semi-realistic way. bird wings connect like human arms do to our shoulders, and adding an extra shoulder to a human's back can end up looking… weird.

the way i do it is usually by extending that shoulder-like joint and turning it slightly to accomodate for a human's anatomical structure and everything. (Basically, I pretend like there's an arm coming from the shoulder blade and build the wing around that.)

I'm sure that was confusing so here's me trying to explain it a little better:

Ok so now that the anatomy is out of the way, i'm still not great at feather placement on my own so i'll usually look up real wings for reference (try to find one that's in the same position as what you want, but it doesn't have to be perfect. it's just a guideline to where the feathers will go.) for this example, i'll use this one:

(found by googling 'bird wings')

so, let's say we've already got our pose drawn out. the next thing to do is do a rough gestural of the wings using the method from before of imagining an arm back there.

you'll notice the wings are in a similar position to that bird photo. not exact, but similar. (another tip, see how the wings kind of mirror the person's arms in that pose? i've found that in general, that makes wing poses feel more dynamic.)

Next step is the feathers! feathered wings tend to have 3+ layers of feathers. (i usually draw 3 or 4) their distribution usually looks something like this:

those "finger" feathers are the best to draw imo!!

now we can apply this to our drawing, using our gestural for posing, and our bird photo for reference.

Layer 1:

Layer 2:

Layer 3:

And now we erase some of the guidelines we made (NOT all of them, just the ones that aren't part of the final structure) and voila!

A perfectly dynamic winged figure!

This got a bit long and probably rambly but i love drawing wings so i wanted to be as thorough as possible!! i hope this helped, and lmk if you have any questions!