40 Days of Art: Animal Drawing
Apr. 7th, 2011 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI've written a lot about drawing people, but today I have to touch upon our animal friends. Chances are at some point you will need to draw an animal so it's a good idea to be fairly familiar with them in general. Once again, there's really no way to get there other than just to draw them. People think this means going to a zoo, and it is certain that zoos are a great place to see a lot of different interesting animals in one location, but saying you can only learn to draw animals at a zoo is like saying you can only learn to cook in a fancy restaurant. Good old homestyle animals can teach you a lot, too! Chances are you or someone you know has a cat or dog – those will teach you about how quadrupeds work. You might know someone with a pet bird, or live close to a park in which there are ducks or geese, or live near the sea and have gulls and crows readily at hand, and everywhere has pigeons. You might have to travel a bit to find an ungulate, but if there's a petting zoo, stable, pony ride, or living history farm nearby, you've got a good resource for hoofed mammals. Reptiles, fish, amphibians, and arthropods are a bit harder to find, but also tend not to be so in-demand for drawings, so you can wait until you find yourself with access to a zoo to add those to your repertoire, or try to learn as much as you can from videos and books.
The key to successful animal drawing is to understand how the animal is built and how that comes into play in the pose you are drawing. Animals very rarely are so courteous as to stand still long enough for you to draw them, so you have to jot down a rough sketch of the pose as quickly as possible (the Bradbury Snapshot comes in handy here), then build information and details on that as you collect them from that animal as it goes about its business. The muscles and surface features will stay in the same place no matter what the animal is doing, all you have to do is take what you see in whatever position they're in now and apply it to the pose you drew before. In order to do this, you have to know some basics of their anatomy, so before you go drawing, do a bit of research. You can probably find some decent animal anatomy books at the library – I know DK puts out some useful stuff so check the J section too – or you can take the plunge and look up Muybridge's Animals in Motion, which is still one of the most exhaustive studies of animal anatomy in practise.
While the zoo is fun, your everyday sources of animal interaction can give you a good grounding in the different 'makes' of animal. If you know how to draw a bird, a quadruped carnivore, an ungulate, or even better, a couple from each group, you can use research and observation to learn how different species use the same basic structure in slightly different ways.
Also, don't limit yourself to doing anatomical drawings. See if you can also capture some of their body language; try to capture what they might be thinking or feeling. That really makes them come alive, rather than being furry/feathery/scaly robots of different shapes and sizes.
The key to successful animal drawing is to understand how the animal is built and how that comes into play in the pose you are drawing. Animals very rarely are so courteous as to stand still long enough for you to draw them, so you have to jot down a rough sketch of the pose as quickly as possible (the Bradbury Snapshot comes in handy here), then build information and details on that as you collect them from that animal as it goes about its business. The muscles and surface features will stay in the same place no matter what the animal is doing, all you have to do is take what you see in whatever position they're in now and apply it to the pose you drew before. In order to do this, you have to know some basics of their anatomy, so before you go drawing, do a bit of research. You can probably find some decent animal anatomy books at the library – I know DK puts out some useful stuff so check the J section too – or you can take the plunge and look up Muybridge's Animals in Motion, which is still one of the most exhaustive studies of animal anatomy in practise.
While the zoo is fun, your everyday sources of animal interaction can give you a good grounding in the different 'makes' of animal. If you know how to draw a bird, a quadruped carnivore, an ungulate, or even better, a couple from each group, you can use research and observation to learn how different species use the same basic structure in slightly different ways.
Also, don't limit yourself to doing anatomical drawings. See if you can also capture some of their body language; try to capture what they might be thinking or feeling. That really makes them come alive, rather than being furry/feathery/scaly robots of different shapes and sizes.
