Digitigrade leg designs from the past

William Bouguereau, Nymphs and a satyr, 1873

Bouguereau cared for composition above all else. This satyr’s legs here are like transplanted chamois legs and look kind of believable in the still image, even though they would probably look unnatural in motion. The fur coat starting halfway down the thigh also feels contrived to me (nice excuse to show the satyr's fully human buttocks!) but aesthetically it certainly works.

Elihu Vedder, Marsyas Enchanting the Hares, 1899

The legs portrayed in this picture are easy to the eye and give a good outline and balance to the satyr’s figure, but they don’t make sense from the anatomical point of view. The calves look like they have no volume and are somehow fused with the thigh. The shaggy fur isn’t enough to conceal the inconsistency, but the legs aren’t really a focal point of the picture so it’s the overall impression that matters. The figure’s outline is very similar to a common hieroglyph depicting a sitting woman, I suspect it is an actual quotation:

I run into the above problem all the time - I have a nice pose in mind but it would force the legs to bend in impossible ways. I used to try all sort of weird leg designs to keep the anatomy as consistent as I could but ultimately I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. In most cases I’d rather use a leg design which feels balanced and has a good outline even if it’s anatomically impossible.

Even though I study my fair share of anatomy I'm not veterinarian and designing a truly consistent model would require also require the kind of 3D simulations used for big budget games and movies. In fact there are some cool digitigrade designs in games and movies (the minotaurs of Narnia come to mind) but I can't remember any instance of them exploring the full extent of the mobility which an anthro body with digitigrade legs could have, probably beacuse it's not required by the media. For them creating believable walk/run cycles is the most important thing. On the other hand a lot of anthro art is still pictures of nudes and sex scenes in which the nuances of what a limb can or cannot do are more relevant.

Carlos Schwabe, The Afternoon of a Faun, 1923

Same leg design as Bouguereau. Here the weird leg anatomy is exploited well for dramatic effect, they are supposed to look uncanny. A human in the same pose would look awkward rather than impressive.

Unknown artist, Pan and Daphnis, III-II century BC

This is one of the most believable designs I could find in ancient art and it’s similar to what is expected of realistic anthro art today. The thighs actually look like they are part human and part animal, and the legs seem to bend just like goat legs. They are also shorter than human legs compared to the torso, which would give Pan a low center of mass helping with balance (balance being the biggest issue with the idea of bipedal digitigrade legs).

Some thoughts on portraiture of anthro characters

A small oil portrait of the character Tedros, done for Anbessa on Furaffinity.

There used to be a lot of rules on how to do official people's portraits before impressionism and the modern art era. One rule which stuck me as odd is that smiling was strongly discouraged because it could distort facial features and would make the painting tiresome to look at for a long time. It is true that smiling expressions can be annoying to look at unless the smile is very subtle (e.g. the Mona Lisa) or the whole painting is very stylized (e.g. portraits by Boldini, the impressionists, caricatures, etc.). Also telling the model to keep a neutral expression allowed him or her to relax and display their most natural attitude.

I have no idea whether this concept may apply to anthro characters. After all there is no real model to copy from and many animal muzzles don't look very expressive to untrained eyes, especially when they sport a neutral expression. But it's an interesting challenge because neutral expressions are always hard to draw convincingly, it's easy to make them look dull or silly.

Even if you draw a realistic anthro muzzle, the most straightforward way of making it expressive is to map cartoon expressions like these onto its features:

This kind of "standard" expressions can actually be applied to anything (animals, objects, etc.) as long as it has the equivalent of a mouth, two eyes with visible white and a discernible pupil (so we can understand where the gaze is pointing) and very mobile eyebrows. A lot of RL animals look like they have no expression just because the white of their eyes is not visible and they have no facial features similar to eyebrows, while animals like cats and blue-eyed huskies feel very expressive because they have both.

I often abuse eyebrows to exaggerate expressions in my pictures and I know sometimes I'm guilty of stepping into the 'TUDE eyebrows minefield. So in this picture I downplayed eyebrows a lot (though the dark patterns around the eyes work fine as proxies) and I tried to keep a neutral expression. I'm quite pleased with the result. Now I have a few other ideas to test in small portraits like this one...

"I remember" done

The restricted earths palette is great, I'm already in love with it. It makes saturation and temperature so much easier to experiment with! I added only some cadmium yellow here.

I selected the extinct animals from the list on a precious but utterly depressing site: http://extinctanimals.petermaas.nl/

Here is a detail of the figurines: 

Starting from upper left they are:
- Baiji (aka Yangtze River Dolphin)
- Aldabra Warbler
- Po'o-uli
- Nukupu'u
- Christmas Island Pipistrelle
- Conondale Gastric-brooding Frog
- Partula snails in general (more than 50 species wiped out at once, one of the saddest episodes in the history of biology)
- Aldabra Banded Snail
- Alaotra Grebe

I tried to make them as recognizable as possible but I guess they show better in the sketches (the ones circled in red are the ones I used, except the frog which I improvised while coloring):

The one at the top (the Warbler) is actually represented belly-up, because for many of the animals listed on the site all the references I could find were photos of specimens preserved in some museum. Better than nothing though...

Alex the Mastermind

The initial idea was to send this as a presente to Dr. Pepperberg as a token of appreciation for her efforts to understand animals. Maybe I'll do it anyway, but I'm not sure this version of the image is appropriate for that. As much as I like anthros they are not the answer to everything and this parrot just doesn't feel like an anthro version of Alex.

I like to study anatomy thorougly and so I have always played with the anatomy of the anthros I draw and invented unusual designs like this one. I especially like functional designs which keep key features of the original animal but don't show stuff which is blatantly against physics (such as wings on a human-size creature) or would be very awkward for a real creature. That's why the owl in Harvest Moon has a birdlike body with backward knees, vestigial wings and fake beak over a human mouth. Such designs are cool for original characters like that one, but in this case, the more I look at it the more it feels weird.

When playing with anatomy with a realistic style the risk of falling into the Unbcanny Valley is always high and I think I crossed the line with this parrot. Maybe it's the beak - I left it as in the real bird because it's Alex's "face" I wanted to show after all, but maybe I should have gone all the way and used a vestigial beak like I did for the owl. Maybe it's that the legs bent in that odd way are too promintent (and very different from those of a real perched parrot) and look Exorcist-y. Maybe it's that the coloring is not very good, I did this before learning the details of color temperature and also I didn't pay enough attention to texture, and as a result the feathers look like octopus skin, and are too much detached from the rest of the picture.

I'll let this rest during vacations and give it a freshed look later. If I still have this impression I'll do a remake with either a different anthro parrot or a with a regular parrot.

Studies from 2009 - Quadruped quick sketches

I wrote a previous note about gesture drawing for animals, but that example was about birds which are easy to sketch quickly, though it's very hard to draw them accurately or in unusual poses and the wings are a puzzle on their own. With quadrupeds even getting a basic shape right is more difficult.

At the beginning my biggest problem with quadrupeds was that I saw too many things going on - too many limbs in motion, too many lines to follow, too many masses:

When doing gesture drawing of humans the most important line is usually the backbone, and all other lines follow logically from it. Sometimes it is obvious in quadrupeds too:

But I look on purpose for weird poses where it is hard to figure out which lines are the most important for the overall shapes. Giraffes have unusually long legs, the neck is a unique feature which changes a lot the visual balance of their body, and on top of that their movements are very constrained. So trying to make giraffes look agile and not stiff is an interesting exercise.

(Warning: click for slightly NSFW giraffe)

The little figures on the right are a possible way to sketch quadruped poses considering only a few main lines and masses. I did a lot of them too and it turns out they are also a good exercise in synthesis, to train oneself to remember well the proportions and two or three key features of a species. The can be useful to study features at any level, for example to study small differences between species which look very similar, as in this example with antelope horns:

More 30 minute sketches

The next posts will be more about anthros, WIPs and annotated sketches, but in the meanwhile I think sharing these exercises is useful too. They are not very funny to do, so it's better to do them inbetween other stuff rather than diving head first into them, but they teach a lot of things which I wouldn't feel comfortable trying in a proper picture. All of these are acrylics on paper with classical limited palettes of 3-4 colors (for most of them Yellow ochre, burnt sienna/Van Dyck brown, titanium white, ivory black).

For the animals I started from photos which look very static and I tried to add some feeling of movement using the direction of strokes:

For landscapes I'm doing mostly value studies, trying ways to render things like tangled branches and mist:
(This is an ice cliff painted with an odd palette of white, black, ultramarine, and cadmium red for the shadows.)

Also some loose drawings, mostly exercises to keep the species recognizable in spite of stylization or parts of the body being hidden:

Owl feathers and facial masks

Studies for the crucified owl painting and the current one.

Some thoughts on sketching feather coats. Even finding good ways of making thumbnails is hard with all the variety of coats, limbs, etc., but I think that certain feelings which are typical of an animal's appearence should be given even in the crudest doodle. Birds often give the impression that they are covered by few broad sheets rather than many individual feathers, so I prefer to sketch them like that.

The facial mask is the most typical feature of a barn owl. From the front is looks almost flat, but from the side it reveals a quite complex 3D shape.

(from Wikipedia)

I don't like drawing anthros with a true beak, so when drawing anthro birds I usually give them a mammal's mouth with the upper part of the beak on top of it. This gives them a very flexible mouth while keeping the appearance of a bird or a gryphon.

But for barn owls the proportions and the shape of the mask are important, they are a big part of the appeal to me. Barn owls also have a few feathers on both sides of the beak which hide away most of the mouth, so that the mask surface is smoother and it can do a better job of focusing sounds. For me small functional details like that one are part of the appeal of animals.


The head shape I've settled on is more or less this:

Studies from last year - Gesture drawing for animals

Gesture drawing is a classical drawing exercise which is somewhat related to the line of action concept. The idea is to sketch human figures very quickly (like 30-45 seconds), without detail but trying to capture the essence of the pose/movement. Posemaniacs.com has a very good Flash tool for that.

I wanted to do the same with animals, so I used a slideshow program to show random photos from my collection for 30-40 seconds each, and the first attempts sucked quite a lot - how can you draw an animal you have never studied before in just 30 seconds and have it not suck?

Boobies with Issues & deformed cats!

But later I go the point.

30 seconds are not enough to draw a body, you can only draw a few lines and shapes in that time. That's what gesture drawing is about - training the eye to break down poses and movement so it can quickly pick up the most important shapes and ignore the rest. It's learning to analyze a body without getting distracted by details like fur texture or colors.

Starting to figure it out?

Learning to see the individual shapes is as important as seeing the harmony of the whole body and it's even more important when you have to rely mostly on photos and videos, which is the only practical way to draw exotic animals on a regular basis. Photos are cluttered by useless details and this kind of exercise forces you to ignore it and look only at the essential stuff. Which makes it easier to learn and remember the looks of many different species.

Gesture drawing is well known in art academies but again I found almost nothing about doing this with animals. In future posts I'll review the artists I found who have studied the topic, however none of them has gone into much detail, even Glen Vilppu, who has done the most thorough studies of animal gestures so far. And nobody worked on truly exotic animals either - most artistic studies of animals are limited to horses and a handful of other common animals.

Figurines

Back from a day of fundraising for the WWF. My local group is selling animal figurines crafted in Ecuador from dried nuts of the Tagua tree. Some of them are quite interesting because you can tell exatly which species they are, in spite of being exotic animals stylized in an unusual way.

This is a very recognizable frigate bird. The dots on the front even remind the sparse feathers seen at the borders of the bird's air sac when it is inflated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Male_Frigate_bird.jpg

This is especially interesting. The black spots are enough to make me think of an orca immediately, even though the orca pattern is very different from this one. Without the spots it would look like a weird generic whale, but the most well known cetacean with a visible black pattern is the orca, so even a small spot immediately reminds of it. The rounded forehead and the shape of the muzzle also are very similar to an orca's, even thought the proportions of the rest of the body are warped.

A porcupine. I don't know them well enough to tell if it's one species in particular but it's carefully carved to show that the spikes only cover the front part of the body.

The design of this one is just amazing. I wonder how many western artists could come up with such a beautiful stylization of an insect. There were two kind of grasshopper figurines, very similar but with different heads, so again I wouldn't be surprised if they were based on two particular species from Ecuador. They show well that the author is familiar with all sort of critters and is used to observe them closely.