A Guide to Angel Wing Drawings!

For some reason, we all love angel wing drawings! It is one of those things that artists love to perfect because drawings of angel wings resonates very well with people on many different levels.

The most wonderful thing about this subject is that it is open to your own interpretation. Some will just follow the guidelines of a bird's wing while others will try to elaborate a little bit more.

Some artists will choose to distort its proportions while others may give it additional colors or effects. Since there is a lot of ways of creating angel wing drawings, I will show you my method that allows you to make your own unique wings.

So start up your digital canvas and follow along!

1. Gesture drawing and form

On a new layer, start with a quick gesture drawing. Your sketch should contain flow points that suggest its proportions and variations.

This sketch will set the tone for the entire wing so you need to choose very carefully how you want to start portraying your wings.

For example, in my quick gesture sketch, I am using the anatomy of a bird's wing. There is the main shoulder connecting to the elbow and to the wrist.

What I did here was added a new layer of feathers under the primary feathers. This gives an exaggerated look to the wing.

In addition, the suggested layers for feathers overlap one another near the base because I want to portray the anatomy of an arm underneath all those feathers.

Once you have the variation you wanted, start filling in the bits with a large chalk brush to give it some value to use.

2. Create details through smudging

Normally, you would start painting in the details using your digital brush. That is a safe bet to use. However, what I am suggesting is to not use your digital brush this time.

Instead, I want you to try creating angel wing drawings with the smudge tool. To use this correctly, put the smudge tool on 100% opacity and set your pressure sensitivity to increase or decrease the smudge brush sizes.

With the full pressure on opacity turned on, start smudging in the individual feathers. Right away, you will notice groups of colors (depending on brush size) being dragged violently to where your digital stylus is going.

This creates a nice range of colors for the feathers as well as separating the feathers from one another in one quick step.

Of course, you may need to go back to the brush tool for some minor touchups here and there. Though overall, you will see excellent definition of each and every feathered layer.

3. Painting the shadows

For this section, you will need to clean up your entire wing. Start erasing gesture lines that you do not need. As well, erase around the outline of the wing to give it further definition.

You will still need to use your smudge brush in this step. Instead of using full opacity, switch the opacity setting to align it with your pen's pressure sensitivity instead.

From there, grab a nice round brush and gently smudge it to define each individual feather.

Make sure you smudge the little hints of shadow underneath each feather layer but make sure you don't smudge the outline of the feathers itself. You want to keep that definition as much as possible.

Once you are satisfied with your results, preserve the transparency of your wing layer. The next step is to decide whether your wing is facing the front or the back.

To pain it from the underside, create a gentle dark patch in the middle of the wing to show indentation. It's best to do this with the burn tool as you do not want to over paint existing details.

If you want to show the angel wing drawings from over head, paint a light patch instead as a means to create an outside curvature.

4. Final touches

With the layer transparency still preserved, the final steps will involve defining further details of each feather and to merge it with your background.

Using a fine brush, start to paint in the details of each individual feather fanning out. Sometimes, you may want to take off your transparency if you still have some 'holes' in your solid wing layer that prevents you from painting the strands correctly.

Once all these strands are done, continue to preserve the transparency and switch to a larger brush. You will need to sample the background color and gently glaze over your wing with it.

After that, it is just switching between the brush tool, the smudge tool, and the eraser tool to refine it until you are satisfied with the results.

You can pretty much do any types of variations using this simple procedure. Your imagination is the only limitation!

I hope you had fun following along and allowing me to show you how I create my angel wing drawings in this lesson. Make sure to submit your work as I look forward to seeing your angel wing drawings in this site's gallery!

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