Stretches before sparring 💪

So, your Pugmire art is more like "animal head on bipedal body", as opposed to the general "furry" style; and I like it, but I have to ask a question on how you draw that. Specifically, the necks. Quadrupeds have a very different head-to-body angle than bipeds do; how do you deal with that transition in your drawing?

I'm gonna be honest and say I haven't really figured it all out yet? And my aversion to the "furry" style is pretty simple: I hate drawing hair. Fur and feathers I can figure out well enough, but hair!? HAIR!? fuck. It is a weakness of mine. I'd rather draw hands.

I mostly just play with all the elements until they look right enough. I've limited myself to headshots and cartoons of my pugmire characters partly because I'm still trying to figure out my process.

I use a lot of tricks to make it look right in the meantime though. Mainly obfuscation.

Don Keay, for example, how does his neck work? I'm not sure, but I put a scarf around it and gave him droopy shoulders, hunched posture and it looks about right. For some species, like Simone the salamander, I just round the back of their head and make their neck a little longer to compensate. It is a little easier, I find, for lizards because many of them can hold their heads and necks in positions I can make look more human with little tweaking.

Honestly, extending the neck a little works well enough for most of my Pugmire critters.

There was a tutorial that I can't seem to find again that showed how one could either give the animals the back skull like a human to make the transition to neck easier, *or* giving them a longer neck and having it kind of angle so the animal skull is in the correct shape and position on a bipedal body. I mostly do the former though I really want to work towards doing the later because I like the effect better. But I'm not very deep into anatomy studies. Because of my confidence level and anxiety I mainly focus on "getting it done" and "making it good enough" rather than figuring out the biology behind the images I make.

At least the ones I post, the ones where I am figuring out various techniques never get shared because I mostly delete them as I go because I am not good at keeping my practices and sketches.

Right now my art is more like collages of elements that I stick together to make the illusion I want and less like fully articulated beings. But it suits my purposes.