Seraf Followup

Bit of a followup on some anatomical sketches I did a while back, drawn during some downtime right after classes had happened but when I hadn't quite crashed into a more sedimentary state yet.  The Serafs are basically foxes, right, so I ought to go and look up some existing studies on them, but I like trying to work from scratch and slowly figure stuff out.  I'm not doing anything with these sketches, so the goal isn't really to make something good, just to get practice in an area I haven't dabbled in much at all.

This is pretty much using the exact same muscle structure as the previous drawing, but with more emphasis on the face, and with things jostled around just a bit to make it feel more natural.  I'm much more happy with this than the previous drawing - the big thing with drawing any character or species or anything like that to me is to do it a lot, and eventually I think you'll start to wear into a groove where bodies and faces don't feel so awkward and Frankenstein-ish.  It gets a little bit easier to remember where all the muscles go without re-checking my diagrams, and forcing myself to work from that starting point helps me keep the character looking natural in different poses and across multiple drawings, introducing a sort of mathematical rigidness to the whole thing.

I wasn't planning on doing any of the rest of the body, but then when I finished the head I found out I really didn't want to do the body, which was a cue for me that I probably should.  Sometimes I fall for the temptation of isolating full-character shots and what a head looks like and never connecting them together, which allows my styles to diverge too much and feel weird when put together.  Plus it gives me another excuse to take a shot at paws, which are weird, and don't work the way that I would have expected them to.  

Grab a cat paw sometime (if your cat allows it) and feel how their toes work.  Those things have legit knuckles, it explains so much about how their paws deform when the stretch.  Dogs (and foxes) must be a bit different, but I don't have any of them around to check.  And the Seraf are only loosely based on existing animals anyway, so I have no problem playing fast and loose with their biology.