I don't see zorgoia paws in there.... :( (Great work though)

2 n 3 are my fav ones

love this c;

Anatomy and artistically-speaking, this is terrific work!

Opinion only: I always get distracted by the fact that digigrade-style feet would be extremely unfeasible for bipedal creatures. I mean, ask any woman who wears high heels and they'll tell you that even after only a few hours it starts to really hurt, and not even if they're standing the entire time. Standing up for any period of time or running with footpaws like this would be torturous after a really short time.

But, it's a choice of anatomical preferences, and let's face it, I'm talking about bipedal, talking, high-grade intelligent animals with various other humanoid features, so to go on about things like this are kind of redundant. XD

That's because plantigrade feet simply are not designed for this purpose. Forcing the foot to point like this stretches out flesh that only bends that way infrequently.

Sure, but digigrade feet such as this push the entire body weight down on the ankle structure, essentially putting strain on a single joint structure where the support for it is angled away from it, which means that the balance of the weight is pushing down into a structure with unbalanced support. That's kind of more what I was referencing. The balancing problems with digigrade foot structures would mean that any kind of momentum pressing against them forwards or backwards would knock them over incredibly easily, and the strain against the ankles in the event of application of leverage, like trying to push something with the feet planted, would strain the ligaments to an extent that could tear them very easily.

Like I said, though, I'm talking about this in regards to walking, talking animals... XD I'm trying to bring too much realism into fantasy.

I'm Plantigrade Mafia myself, but I don't mind when people argue it's nice aesthetically, only that it would work (it's fine if you have more than two legs or you have your spine parallel to the ground for the part of your body with organs in it, not so much otherwise). But then you have to stop the realism train somewhere otherwise you hit a brick wall with "and they wouldn't have fur" written on it, given that after you learn other animals' fur will fit on you if you hit them enough, there's a lot of advantages to not having your own (better temperature regulation, easier to check yourself for bugs and diseases, less prone to ignition when you discover fire, etc) vs very few to having it.

Pretty much all this. ^

I dunno, I prefer plantigrade, myself. But I go all the way with it, like, removal of pads and with toes instead. I wrote up this whole long canon for a project I'm working on that I hope to turn into a webcomic with Tiera Foxglove and a few others, and I did this whole thing for explaining how evolution progressed in a convergent fashion that resulted in a lot of traits being... Okay, long story short, I designed my furries and scalies with more hominid traits than anthropomorphic traits. Maybe it's just because of my fascination with evolutionary biology or something, I have no idea. XD

Yeah, you know what my thing that bugs me more than it should is? Any reference to "paws" having fingers. Those are hands argh

Couldn't it be feasible with a shortened Achilles tendon and heel bone closer to the ankle? I mean, athletes and dancers spend most of their time on the ball of their foot and toes, right? Then walking heel-toe would just be slower for a digitgrade fur.

They do, but all day, every day? I mean, the body is capable of adapting in micro-evolutionary terms to certain lifestyles and environmental changes...but on THAT scale? As a constant basis? That's different from taking a quarter of your day to devote your body to a particular method of use/abuse.

Evolution rendered humans with the feet that we have to aid us in the travels and tasks we are adapted to. We're capable of long-distance travel, marathons, miles upon miles of daily travel in fact, because of the design of our hips, legs, and feet. All of them are dependent on the design of each other, too; digigrade feet could not work with hominid hip structuring, for example. The dispersion of weight would mean that even if the ankles themselves could sustain the weight for any extended period of time, the spinal column would collapse or the knees would snap outwards after a matter of hours.

Long story short, plantigrade feet are, as far as we know, the only ones capable of holding an individual up as bipeds. Digigrade feet are great for quadripedal locomotion, but for bipedal movement, they are wholly unfeasible.

Plus digigrade feet place characters too uncomfortably close to being inhuman for my sexual tastes, anyway. To be frank, furries already tease my brain's borders of understanding of bestiality. The only thing comforting that is the level of intellect of the characters and the anatomical similarities. The fewer similarities there are, though, the harder it becomes for me to reconcile the differences with the similarities.

Also, F-K, I'm REALLY sorry if this seems like I'm tearing apart your submission's comments thread with my bullshit, it's just a statement of opinion and I'm just discussing it with others, I'm not intending at all for it to be inflammatory, insulting, or derogatory of your style or the tastes of others in any way, I just figured I'd let you know. Drama's common enough that I don't wanna be contributing to it. Alas, it's become such a problem that anyone with any real interest in intellectual discourse, even in silly matters like this, can be viewed as being inciting towards inflammatory discourse, which I hope is not what it seems I've provoked.

Haha, don't worry about it; it doesn't look like anyone's getting hurt or bothered really, I don't mind discussions of such nature; it's interesting stuff to think about.

Martial artists are taught to stand in a digitigrade stance because it actually improves balance. It's partly due to how weight is distributed, and also the fineness of control the additional joint+muscle groups around the ankle can give when not stuck resting on the ground.

I'm not saying we stand like someone in heels. That's ridiculous, our foot isn't structured that way. But there are plenty of bipedal species with digitigrade foot structure in real life that do. Birds, kangaroos, and many bipedal dinosaur species all survived just fine walking on their toes (barring flaming balls of death from on high, of course!)


And the opposite of this whole question is true, as well. German Shepherds, for example, are often bred by show breeders for "attractive" "low heels" and actually develop hip problems due to the poor stance...digitigrade feet that weren't meant to stand plantigrade but which do anyway lead to strain and damage.

I think it's actually the opposite: deliberately taking a less stable and well-balanced stance means you can move out of that stance faster. If so, it's the same reason modern fighter jets are designed to be unstable in level flight.

You can't call it less stable or less balanced when it makes you harder to knock over with a shove to the shoulder. That's just silly! Being caught flat-footed is bad for a reason.



Walking/running on the balls of your feet also has the benefit of reducing impact, which helps fight knee and lower back problems. Time to put a silver bullet through the head of the plantigrade superiority myth ;)

I have a feeling that's because it's easier to actively redistribute your weight, the raised ankles work like shock absorbers. The downside being you're easier to knock down by sweeping your feet out from under you because you're not bearing as much weight on them, and that you're not going to be doing any heavy lifting (you will not find anyone trying to powerlift on tiptoe).

Most people also do not spend their entire life in martial arts poises.

Birds, dinosaurs and suchlike can run digitigrade because they bear their body weight differently: their spine is parallel to the ground in their torso. You can't apply anatomy from a creature that looks like a potato with a pipe cleaner stuck in it to a fully upright biped, it doesn't work that way.

You aren't making much sense. I'm not even sure where to begin tearing this gobbledygook apart, so I'm just going to stop talking to you as a waste of time. ;)

Well, since you're the one making the exceptional claim here, concession accepted?

I have actual qualifications in biology, not that you really need to understand anything more than how to work out stress over a cross-sectional area to see the problem with any "upright biped non-plantigrade would work" claim. The stresses a toe-walking upright biped's feet would endure would fuck it up in short order. We're not talking about some imaginary creature which is always young and spends its entire life running and doing martial arts poses, we're talking something that has to do all life things: climb stairs, lift and carry things, push shopping trolleys, get old, and so on. You want to guess how many of the people here who like walking on their toes will still be doing it when they're 70? Eventually their footbones would just straight-up snap. You want to guess how many of them would try to carry a TV set up four flights of stairs in that stance?

Just to note further: you seem to not quite understand how running and martial arts actually work with respect to falling: both are about shifting your body weight out of equilibrium to achieve more than you can do with your muscles alone. In other words, they're about falling over without ever hitting the ground. The human run in particular is about constantly throwing yourself off-balance and recovering from it to propel yourself forwards, that's why it takes us so long to learn to do it.

Lifting up on your feet cannot possibly make you more structurally stable because what you're doing is raising your centre of gravity. What it does is place you in a position where you can more easily shift weight to make up for the human body's lack of front-back stability (from the side it's practially a straight vertical line with the centre of mass over halfway up it). Compared to the normal human stance (weight evenly distributed on both feet) this makes you harder to knock down because you can react to the attempt to knock you down more easily. Now with a full digitigrade stance where your ankles are even higher and tilted further forward, you are never going to be able to adopt a stable stance: fine if you're doing something that doesn't require one, not fine if you are.

The thing is, none of this is actually a problem because it proves our plantigrade stance is flexible; we can adopt other stances easily. It's actually an advantage of the plantigrade stance because it doesn't work in reverse: it is hard to drop an ankle eight inches above your footpaw down to the floor to get the stability and lifting advantages of a plantigrade posture.

Humans are a generalised species: we're not great at any one thing, but we can do a little of everything. As a result, when you're trying to make a biped with a body plan like us work, you have to look at all the things we do, not just the ones that favour a particular form of locomotion. You could make all the same arguments you've made with regard to having hands being a disadvantage (we can be outrun by creatures many times our body weight which have four legs, we are less stable, we have more bone and joint problems, etc) if you ignore what having hands actually allows us to do and focus entirely on what things without them do better than us.

Oh, and, if you're wondering WHY I'm bringing reality into fantasy, it's just because it's one of those things that niggles at my brain. Doesn't BOTHER me, exactly, it's just one of those dumb things that comes up in my thoughts no matter how much I try to go "IT'S NOT REAL!" XD

Discussions like this are entertaining and cool though. They get the brain working.

Yeah, I'm just used to people being like "THIS ISN'T RELEVANT ENTIRELY TO WHAT I DID, FUCK OFF!!" so I get uneasy about it.

I get all worried and nervous about how many fucks others give, I guess. I DON'T KNOW. DX

Reality should always be brought into fantasy. How else can we gauge how fantastic something is?


Nothing wrong with digitigrade bipeds from a realism perspective, though. :p



Look up :D

I actually kind of naturally walk and run on my toes (call me weird) so it doesn't phase me to wear heels
I get odd looks too because of it.. And maybe because I'll just be standing there bouncing in place for minutes at a time.

How on earth do you manage that?? o.O; I can't stay on my tiptoes for more than like five minutes, although I CAN run on them, for the sake of moving quietly, but even then, it doesn't take very long for my toes to start aching.

I envy you. D:

Constant practice I suppose? Like anything else you eventually get use to it and stop noticing

Just figured i'd point out for the sake of 'info' i guess. i also can go prolonged amounts of time on my toes. in and out of heels. though in heels (talking 5+ or higher) i've walked 3 miles. So. having strength/endurance helsp which i'd assume animals/furries that use their muscles would have.

Well it's not so much endurance I'm thinking of, as muscles are capable of micro-adaptation, as much as I am thinking of ligament endurance, which is not something that can be trained or improved upon. Our ligaments aren't "designed" (for lack of a better term, though in truth, nothing about any biological anatomy was designed to any extent) to be used in such a way. The reason why so many experience pain when they move and hold themselves in such a way (slash ways) is because our body's are just not put together to handle that kind of movement, which is why most dancers and ballerinas tend to end up with lots of issues with their tendons before they hit their lives' mid-points. The muscle structures can support that constant usage, but it's like the drywall of a structure and its steel structure trying to hold up to support beams that are made of bronze; two may be strong but if one point of the structure is not made of a material that is built for such a task, that one point will fail the rest of the structure itself.

There's a reason you don't see many ballerinas who are over the age of 30 and still doing what they did when they were in their early-to-mid 20s, after all. The amount of training and effort that needs to be placed into keeping the body capable of supporting weight in such a manner so frequently becomes untenable. That's not even for a minute-to-minute kind of set-up, either. Imagine furries, who needed to walk that way all day, every day! By the time they hit 28, they'd be incapable of walking without braces, crutches, and other forms of supports, if they were digigrade. D:

standing on tip-toes isn't digitigrade, that's what's more properly called "unguligrade," the way horses/cows/deer stand.

Consider that even MORE alien to the human foot structure than digitigrade. It will make you easier to knock over even than being caught flat-footed (because martial artists stand digitigrade!)

Digitigrade feet generally have multiple segments of the digits on contact with the ground, and possibly even the end of the foot bones themselves.

I also do this. Just so you and others reading this dont think you're alone.

people always point out my calves and its from walking, dancing, and standing on my toes. ESPECIALLY if im barefoot.

Feeties!

Dem foots.

I have no interest in feet whatsoever, but it's safe to say that digitigrade paw feet are the closest thing to even giving me a hint of a foot fetish.

Amazingggggg

paws always give me so much trouble...keeping this for future referencing...

mrawrf...paws <3

My biggest gripe about the way you draw paws is the fact that you make the toes either too small or flat. At least in comparison to the rest of the foot.
I'm not going to get into the intricacies about anatomy, considering we're dealing with fictional species here. But at least to me, I just find the way you draw them to be visually unappealing. At least these days.
There have been some exceptions where you've drawn nice looking paws. Honestly, it shouldn't be too hard to see why.
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13363579/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5142170/

Personally, I find hioshiru's work to be the best example of how the paws would look on anthro characters.

Good tutorial of sorts, here

I wouldn't consider myself a paw guy, but I think they're cool looking and can add a lot of personality to a character (just like every artist's dread - hands).

Easiest way for me to think about paws is to just to imagine how big that main bottom pad would have to be to support all the weight of a biped. I think the big pad takes up most of the "width" or diameter of the foot on actual animals too, so when you draw a bigger paw for a bipedal character, you gotta make sure you have room there for that pad and all the toes to stick out past it (and the middle toes' length looks about as long as the big pad, like in your #4). I think your #2 is a nice stylization - just enough realism to make it sorta believable, but it looks a bit nicer than a regular paw, at least to me.

Another thing that got me is how far back the two side toes are - in those simple cartoons you always see of a paw, the four toe pads at the top are almost lined up, but in actual dogs, they almost make a pentagon shape, with the big pad being the point, like in your #7. Of course, there are stylization choices you can make to change all of this stuff up, like you were playing around with here, but I really think adding as much realism as you can comfortably fit in your designs can go a long way to make your stylizations stronger and feel more believable.

All that said, I'm still not so great at paws lol, so I'm right there with ya on needing to practice them. Just thought I'd share a couple things that help me out.

Heh.

Digital balls.

Heh heh heh.

*Everyone* needs to get better at paws~ =3=

Love the way you draw paws ^^

Those people who wrote essays on paws should shut up :P

great ref work :)

Very rad.

I always approve of paw studies. c: I don't think any artist has yet drawn the "perfect" paw (though  cougr gets VERY close!)

Thenx fer posting, I really need to practice this stuff more...

I like to think I take criticism well; if multiple people point out the same thing, it should be addressed, or it'll never get better! Already learned a few things.

Love the care you put on these. very good ref. part of the digitigrade mafia, in some ways. (Digitigrade= no head hair either XD).

One note is that you need to beef up the toes a little with increased presure, you need increased surface area, and that is by larger toes for a bipedal. Longer toes can dowrk as well.

Yeah that's one thing I'm gonna work on for the future, the toes being more feasible.

feasable, and elegant. Mihari with ugly toes just would not do. XD.

This is very helpful! I struggle with drawing paws still. Very well done! X3

post posted in the wrong post spot. de-posted!

D: