Crow sketches #2

Sorry to clutter up the blog with these crappy doodles, but hopefully it goes some way to showing you all my process and might even give you some ideas :]

As I said before I want to really familiarise myself with the crow so I can draw a more accurate model sheet — so I started by nabbing a bunch of images of crows off Flickr and just tracing over the rough body shape. It helped me to really visualise where all of the joints should be placed — particularly the wings, which I've been struggling a bit with. As you can see from the scribbles in the middle, the wings actually have a very similar structure to human arms! They have shoulders on their backs, elbows, wrists and even 'fingers.' They bend and flex in exactly the same way our arms can, so once you get used to that idea it's a lot easier to understand how they fold or spread.

I'm starting to get to grips with the structure a little more now — not too keen on the sketches at the bottom there. The side view is sort of correct anatomically, but lacks all the personality of our crow! I That's always something I could  fix, though. The 3/4 view is just a bit wonky in general — looks a bit off-balance to me? If I brought the head back and spread the legs a little more it might be a bit better.

Feedback and critique is, as always, most appreciated! :]