I don’t think I take too much focus on the fact that the animatronics are… well, animatronic when drawing them! ^^;

I pretty much draw them as I normally would any character! But knowing your anatomy (particularly with how your bones move/where some start and connect alongside others) is crucial! I shouldn’t be one to talk, as I haven’t properly studies anatomy myself, but the difference/significant things I do are:

- Replace the neck with the showing neck of an endoskeleton.

-Sort of ‘divide’ the chest/area above the bottom of the ribcage from the bottom half and show some endoskeleton.

-Wherever the legs tend to start alongside the pelvis, I thicken the lines (to show where further division would be).

-Draw a circular bolt/nut where the knee would be (as that is pretty much the knee of an endoskeleton) and draw a line around the rest of that area on the leg.

-Draw line through the ankles and around the top of where the toes would start.

-Instead of connecting the ear to the very head of an animatronic, make a slight gap of space between it and give it some endoskeleton to make the ears attached.

-Place bolts around the edge of the jaw/underneath the edge of the muzzle (as this is how animatronics would be able to loosely move their mouths up and down).

-Make lines go around the arms at the bottom of the shoulders/top of where the shoulders meet with the top half of the body, elbows, and wrists. (Placing a ball-shaped nut on the elbow tends to vary with me, depending on if it’s bent or not and how much space I happen to place between the top and bottom half of an arm.)

-Draw thick lines around the start of the fingers (where they’re attached to the hand. And draw one line through the thumb and the rest with two lines, to represent the individual bones in each finger. (Bending your own fingers and studying how they significantly bend can also help you know where to put these lines!)

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Heck, bending/feeling around certain parts of your body can help give a sense of how to draw animatronic characters! Of course each one if significant/special in their own way and all methods vary (difference in shape of the head, how sunken in you may want the eyes, tails, scales, etc.), but it’s all about the anatomy! :)

Foxy and Mangle are how I go about this! Mangle especially, at least with the parts of her body that aren’t her neck! That, I tend to goof off with and make it more flexible and (obviously) longer than is probably should be. :’D