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.