Digitigrade legs are essential to drawing furries, mechs, monsters, or freaky humans. First, I don’t judge. Second, this guide will help make sense of these weird feet.

Just so everyone knows what I’m talking about, let’s clear up what exactly a ~digitigrade~ leg is.

It’s a leg where only the PHALANGES (toe) portion of the foot is on the ground. The rest of the foot is off the ground. It’s really common on the back of 4-legged animals. Go find your nearest dog if you don’t believe me.

NOW! If after I said “phalanges” I already lost you – don’t worry! I’m gonna clear everything up right now XD

Step 1 – Understand the Human Foot

To understand bipedal digitigrade legs you need to understand the anatomy of a foot.

There are 26 bones in a human foot, but we only need to know 4 general sections.

Those sections are the:

• phalanges (the toes and ball of the foot)
• metatarsals (the mid foot)
• tarsals (back of the foot and heel)
• ankle and shin (tibia and fibula)

Because I know latin is scary, we’re gonna simplify these areas into basic shapes (see below).

With these colored blobs in place let’s move to…

Step 2 – Modify the Human Foot

Now like our definition said, we’re going to take all the parts of our foot and lift them off the ground EXCEPT FOR the …say it with me… ✨ phalanges ✨ (It’s said “fa-lan-jees” btw)

Honestly, it’s just drawing a character walking on their toes. Maybe it’ll help to think of it that way.

Get everything behind the ball of the foot off the ground !!!

You can play with the relative lengths of the metatarsal and shin portion. It usually helps to make the blue section longer and the red shorter. Example below.

Step 3 – Put It In The Right Place

Now that you have your foot. It’s important you put in the right place for your character.

As a general rule, a character looks balanced when the shoulders line up with the ball of the foot or toes.

It doesn’t have to be EXACT, but too much misalignment it’ll make your character look a little unbalanced.

As always, just practice and play, and I promise you’ll get the hang of it.

We can add these legs to bipedal creatures to give them an animalistic and/or primal feeling.

But that’s it! That’s a digitigrade foot. Now go. Go! Draw some werewolves, demons, satyrs, or whatever. It’s never too early to get warmed up for spooky season.