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Darth_Biomech
Apr '21

From all the tutorials about human anatomy, I gathered that our body is highly proportional and has lots of very neat and simple rules and dependencies that fit into each other very nicely and make the job of drawing a human much easier. That the eyes are at the midpoint from the top of the head to chin, or that the eyes set apart by one eye's width from each other, or that first finger segment is as long as the second and third put together, or that Da Vinci's most famous painting... Our entire face, basically, is very ordered and all its elements are lining up with each other regarding their sizes, positions, and "bounding boxes".

Which made me think, do animal anatomy has similar dependencies? My logic dictates that it should, but I managed to find no examples on my own.

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    Apr '21

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Yulek
Apr '21

yes it does.. which is mainly evolutionary.

like, look at the anatomy of limbs across vertebrates.
there's the same bones, just adapted.

the proportions are different between species, but still every animal will have proportions that can be studied and worked with and follow proportional rules

like heres a wolf

image.png550x711 68.3 KB

image.png1361x861 141 KB

here's a horse

image.png1024x827 292 KB

you find a lot if you just look for "proportion of a _____"

even stuff like this

image.png649x862 585 KB

DokiDokiTsuna
Apr '21

I think the whole concept of biological proportionality is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, y'know? If you insist that we can use some parts of our bodies to measure others and go looking for cute little ratios, I think it's inevitable that you'll find at least a few.

Mostly cause bodies are meant to be proportional...like all bodies. I think all multicellular animals have some form of symmetry; for chordate animals (including humans) that's bilateral. So it's natural that you'd find spacing patterns on both the horizontal and vertical axes; that's kind of...the way it's set up.

Darth_Biomech
Apr '21

Well I wasn't in doubts that that's just how an evolving functional organism is, because it makes sense regarding mechanical functions of the parts, I wanted to see examples of that in action.

rajillustration
Apr '21

Yes, absolutely, if you look up "artistic anatomy" and then whatever animal you're looking into, chances are, some artist has gone in and found the ratios for you.

It's also just how we draw, in general--we think in proportions--Your head tends to be the starting area that you measure everything else from--but you can use any part of the body to create those proportions, if you would like.

The formal proportions we memorize for human anatomy are not really set in stone--especially since they are mostly made by Europeans hundreds of years ago, so you will find differences depending on race and also on the ideal height you want for your characters. Same goes for animals (especially since animal "breeds" for dogs or cats are kind of a human invention and not actually...how animals work)