How To Draw Anime Wings

Hi, my name is Laura Watton, my website is PinkAppleJam.com, I am a co-founder of Sweatdrop Studios and I've been illustrating in manga style for almost 15 years. OK, this tutorial is to talk about wings.

Wings feature quite a lot actually in all sorts of anime and manga stories. It is quite interesting actually, I don't think I've ever seen so many wings in comics before I started reading manga. I think if we were going to really chop it down to the super basics, I'd say there were about 3 different types of wings.

There's this sort of very curly, circular, poofy sort of wing that is kind of popular. Basically, very swirly, very round edged, a bit like a "cross" I suppose. Very, very cute.

Very stubby, much like the characters you might be putting them on. I think if your character is going to be quite angelic, wings would be quite graceful and rounded. Very good practice around Christmas time, you make a lot of Christmas cards, I suppose, with some angels on there.

So, take time out to study the structure of wings, and also anatomical structures of birds wings actually. I think if your character is going to be demonic it's going to have more of an angular design. Spikes where as an angelic character may have rounded tips and so on, more smooth in flow.

A demonic character will have slightly more structure in their wings. They might have spikes, they might have claws, they might have these very nasty things going on; there might be a bit of blood coming out of the back, they may be quite gruesome. So, again, it's all up to your design.

OK, so there you go. There is a rough outline of wings and how to apply them to your character, and don't forget to have fun with it.