Studying Feathers (Part 1)

Recently, I have been wanting to draw something that’s feathery — but I won’t spoil exactly what it is yet. Looking back at my “Vulture” drawing, however, inspired me to study feathers so that I could draw them more accurately.

This will end up being a short series of posts, because I can see this topic getting a bit complicated. To start, I want to look into some of the basic science of feathers. If I know what feathers look like in real life (as well as a bit of how they work), I might better be able to approximate them in my art.

The only downside to starting with the science first is that I am not sure if I will succeed at answering some of my more art-related questions. I guess we will see about that in the upcoming posts. Regardless, I took to Wikipedia(a source that is just reliable enough for artists, granted they can compare what they read to reference images) to learn about the types and shapes of feathers.

The Basic Types of Feathers

There are three basic types of feathers: vaned feathers, down feathers, and “filoplumes.” The filoplume feathers are rarer than the other two and, from what I can tell, not very visible on the bird; they me be too specific for our purposes. The vaned and down feathers are the ones that we are more likely to be concerned with.

The stereotypical feather — the one we see most often portrayed in art — is the vaned feather. It is also known as a “pennaceous” feather, in more scientific terms. These are the feathers most responsible for a bird’s ability to fly and appear on the wings and tail of the bird. They are called “remiges” on the wings, and “rectices” on the tail.

The other type of feather is known as the down feather. It is much simpler, having only a shaft and relatively fewer, disconnected barbs (the barbs will make sense in just a minute). It resides beneath the vaned feathers and serves to insulate the bird. These feathers are most visible on newly hatched chicks and resemble those found on various fossils of dinosaurs.

The Parts of Feathers

The vaned, or pennaceous feathers have several components that are arranged like this:

The barbs are the little offshoots from the shaft that make up the visible, flat part of the feather.

The down feathers only have a shaft and a few wiry barbs, like the “afterfeather” in the image.

The Types of Vaned Feathers

Considering that we will more likely be drawing vaned feathers — especially when they are detached from the bird — it is important to know the different kinds of vaned feathers. There are three that we should be concerned with: primary, secondary, and covert feathers. They take up a formation along the wing that looks like this:

Note how long the shafts of the primary and secondary feathers are — all of this space is filled with the afterfeather and covered by the primary covert feathers. 

The primary feathers connect to what could be considered the bird’s “finger” bones. This means that they can be stretched apart during flight, which is important to know when drawing a bird in the air. The secondary feathers by contrast, connect only to the ulna, or “forearm” of the bird and cannot be spread apart. The covert feathers appear as two distinct sections relating to the type of vaned feather they cover.

The feathers that correspond with the humerus are known as tertial feathers, and do not connect with the bone. I suppose that means they are more prone to movement and compression, while not being entirely under the bird’s control. Otherwise, they look a good bit like the secondary feathers continuing further down the wing.

The primary and secondary feathers each have a different shape. The primaries are long and thin, while the secondaries are shorter and generally rounder.

I threw in the down feather for good measure. Remiges, again, is the more scientific term for vaned feathers.

So that makes up the bulk of what I studied on the scientific end of the subject. Now that we know the basic shapes of these feathers and how they are arranged along the wings, we should be better equipped to draw a more accurate bird. I don’t think you have to memorize the scientific terms, or their exact functions to draw a bird. But I do think knowing a bit about the inner workings of your reference can be an excellent way of improving your representation of it. I just hope that this post cut out some of the less relevant parts and left the more important ones.

In the next part of this little series, I would like to look at how feathers have been depicted in art of varying styles. Art is often a matter of problem-solving, and feathers present a fairly large problem. I am interested in seeing how various artists have solved this problem.

2D Animation in Blender

This post will be a bit of a departure from my usual topic of drawing. I don’t know if I have mentioned this yet, but I would like for this blog to be an exploration of many different kinds of art, and this post is a good example of that.

Today, I will be showcasing a little of my exploration into how technology can assist in the creation of art. Stated less pompously, I mean that I am using a computer program — in this case, for two-dimensional animation — instead of more traditional media. This post will not be a tutorial, as I feel that I have not yet learned enough to confidently share my knowledge on the subject (I plan to later, though). But I still feel that it is something that could be of interest to some of you, provided you are interested in expanding your artist’s tool-set into the digital realm. Perhaps you might want to explore this topic with me. If this is not something that interests you, or you are more inclined to stick to traditional media, I will return to the subject of drawing soon.

Blender

The tool that I am currently examining is called Blender. It is an open source, 3D modeling, animation, video rendering, and game engine software — a lot of things that sound right up a digital artist’s alley, or at least mine. It’s free to use, and you can get it here.

There are a lot of things that can be said about this program and its copious features, but for the sake of this post, I will keep to those that I am using. Blender allows you to sculpt 3D models. For my purposes, I am using simple planes (think flat squares). It also has a complex animation system that uses, most relevantly, bones — or armatures, as they are called in the program.

I used a different piece of software called Krita (also free) to create the shoddy image I later animated in this program (I was more interested in the animation than the overall presentation, heh). I will definitely be covering both of these programs in much more detail later, as they are probably of great interest to anyone looking into various digital art forms.

Cel-based Animation Technique

To illustrate what I am trying to do, I will share a bit of my limited knowledge regarding cel animation. The term “cel” in cel animation is a contracted form of the word “celluloid,” which was a transparent sheet onto which characters were drawn in traditional animation (before computers became capable of simulating these things). If you recall having an “overhead projector” in some of your classes, you will be somewhat familiar with this principle — you can draw on a transparent sheet, and lay another on top of it to draw something else on top of the previous image; both of these images will appear superimposed in the projection.

Animations entailed having a back-lit background, and then laying these transparent cels in layers over the background. The final image would be photographed, and then the next cels would be loaded on and the background adjusted if needed. To make this insanely tedious task a bit less impossible, animators split their characters into pieces that they could then animate individually and later overlay on top of the other components of the character. For instance, an arm would be animated on a separate series of cels, and then each of those would be placed on top of the cel containing the body.

What I am Doing

So you are probably seeing where I am going with this. I split up the following doodle into its component pieces — or into the things that might have been separated onto different cels in traditional animation.

It's like we took a hatchet to him!

I then realigned these things into the proper shape using various methods I will describe in detail later. Essentially I used planes for each piece of the dragon, and then used the bones in Blender to “rig” the image for animation. It ended up being a little rough, because I drew the dragon in segments first instead of drawing him as one entire character and then splitting him more logically.

The bones are those triangle-looking things.

However, the rig worked. The planes moved relative to the position of their bones, just as I had hoped. Sure, it’s no masterpiece — nor is it even that much of a challenge for anyone already mildly versed in Blender — but it is doing essentially what I wanted it to do, and I thought it might be interesting to see if it worked out.

It's a little rough, but I think it demonstrates what I was trying to do.

The more tech-aware readers might already see what I am trying to do here; I am really trying to replicate the functionality of a commercial software called Spine in a free alternative. That is essentially true, and just as Spine’s primary product is meant to create sprites for video games, so is this little project, here.

I am not sure if this particular method will be of much use for the more complicated requirements of animation meant for film — I will definitely need to look into finding more tricks to make that viable, if it even is.

In any case, that’s one of the things I have looked into during the past couple of weeks. I will write about my discoveries as I look further into this.