Secad: As stated before, this is far from my best drawing and definitely not my best Charizard - which may explain the awkward jointing - Although, honestly, vertebrates with a hexapodal anatomy
do not exist on Earth (as you've stated and is honestly pretty obvious to anyone who takes a singular look at skeletal structures, flying wings on tetrapod vertebrates - such as birds and bats - are essentially highly modified hands) and so one is forced to go into speculation when trying to figure out how another set of appendages would connect. Modified shoulder structure with two joints rather than one, perhaps? Or two sets of shoulder-like connectors? The musculature behind this sort of thing would probably be pretty crazy too. But really, the amount of detail I went into in this drawing is not enough to discern much of that - in particular because it was a
birthday present and not an
anatomy lesson.
Also, note that I say another set of
appendages. Charizard is, in essence, Generic Dragon #6 - which suggests Archosaurid (or at least hexapodal alien biosphere equivalent of which) physiology. This sort of physiology could not support a structure similar to insect wings due to the very nature of insect wings.
For starters:
Insect wings are NOT appendages. There is no homology (ALL the Homology! </YGOA>) between any of the insect appendages and their wings. Insect wings are, essentially, outgrowths of the insect exoskeleton, specifically of the nota (singular notum, the broader, larger part of the dorsal plates) of the Mesothorax and Metathorax (the second and third segments of the insect thorax). They do have some form of jointing - but this largely consists of an array of smaller plates (or sclerites). As such, their entire functional mechanism depends on the segmented, plated structure that insects have and vertebrates lack. Actually, in most insects (with the exception of Dragonflies, Damselflies and Mayflies, actually), the wings aren't even connected to muscles directly: muscles are connected to the nota. When they contract the nota are pulled down, and because of the arrangements of the joint plates of the wings (the basalar and subalar plates are particularly important), this causes the wings to bend upwards. When said muscles are relaxed, they flip back down almost exclusively by the elasticity. There are various variations on this in different insects, but that's the general gist of things.
Absolutely nothing in Charizards (or its pre-evolved forms) suggests that they COULD have such a structure (do you see a segmented plated structure on any of them? Neither do I!), and previous stages of the line do not have wings or proto-wings in any form of material
by design. So there goes that idea.
Also (and this is relevant to DS's comment as well): When drawing Pokémon with a higher degree of realism than the cartoony official style one must remember that, while there is room for divergence from the original style,
you still need to remain largely faithful to the original design. It always bugs me severely when people draw Pokémon as currently extant Earth Animals with some funky colors and maybe a crest or two attached to them to the point they aren't recognizable as what they are. And call it HURR DURR REALISTIC. Maybe, but it's not Pokémon. I personally try my best to interpret the source material and give it a biological twist while at the same time not take away its inherent... Pokémon-ness, if you catch my meaning. And yeah, That means not turning an obvious dragon into a weird bug - unless it already has a lot of arthropod elements like in Flygon's case, which I've seen at least one really good arthropod-based interpretation of (but I still see as a more specified, externally plated archosaurid myself).
Tl;dr: Kindly do your research before you start your keyboard, especially when biology and my art thread is concerned! XD
Buuuuuuuuuut enough of that. It's that time of year again where appropriated legends of
Nordic origins are celebrated. And though he has faded from belief by many, there is still one they all expect.
In their tongue, he is Santakiin, Reindeerborn!
Contrary to popular belief, he distributes the damn presents HIMSELF (since his life is after all one huge fucking fetch quest after another).
Well, he
used to have Reindeer... but then they took an arrow to the knee.