How to draw wings in motion?

[Griffin McPherson]

I’m trying to figure out how to draw flapping wings in motion. I searched around and couldn’t find any good examples of other artist’s approach’s so I’m hoping y’all might have some tips for me.

In the top imagine the wings show through the other wings since they’re translucent insect wings and in the bottom one I masked out the overlaps to see how that looks. I just don’t know. I think there’s a lot of different possibilities approaches. Let me know how you would do it!

[AngelinaKizz]

@Griffin for me, I would draw the wing, reduce the opacity and then make multiply layers of its motion all of them blurred so that you get the feel of Vibration rather than specific wing.

[Asyas_illos]

@Griffin ugh my internet cut out as I was replying. yep what @AngelinaKizz says reduce opacity, lots of layers, this is how I would do it

[Griffin McPherson]

Thanks @AngelinaKizz and @Asyas_illos! I’m going to to give that shot. I think a lot of the effect will rely on how I color things in as well so I’ll see how it goes

[Griffin McPherson]

UPDATE: so I tried that advice for the wings. Definitely helps but I still feel like it’s lacking the feeling of motion. What more could I do?

I know the others don’t look right yet. I’m just testing things out on the front most grumble bee

[willicreate]

Take a page from Zipper from Rescue Rangers?

[Asyas_illos]

Yah you need some motion lines maybe

[Asyas_illos]

Tried to find more examples, you’re right there isn’t much

[AngelinaKizz]

@Griffin i would blur the edges, they're too perfect right now to be moving quickly.

[Griffin McPherson]

@Asyas_illos thanks for finding these examples! I still haven’t been able to find any others

[Joen Söderholm]

My first thought when looking at this were the "flaptors" in Studio Ghibli's movie Castle in the Sky - machines that have almost exactly these types of wings. So you could check some frames from that movie for reference. As I recall, the wings there become almost invisible and are mostly drawn as a series of blurry, white lines to indicate how they are vibrating.

I had a similar struggle a while back when I tried to draw the character Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog, with his spinning tails. Looking back, I think it was the right approach to just draw a blurry shape, where you can't see the wings (or tails in this case) at all - but I think I should have reduced the opacity a lot more. Now it feels more like a solid mass than something rapidly moving.

Hope that helps!

[Griffin McPherson]

UPDATE:
blurred wings
Motion lines
Vibration lines

How’s it looking?

[Asyas_illos]

@Griffin nailed it I think