Drawing animals

Exercise Grabbing the chance

With four cats and a golden retriever in the house I have a certain amount of choice when it comes to sketching animals, although they don’t sit still for long, too many friends to play with.

Zack, our golden, here below is a drawing attempted in soft pastels.  It actually looks like him, which is a bonus, although I am not very happy with the ear.  I am happy with the face and details in the mouth. The ear went wrong early on and I found it difficult to recuperate, adding more layers just resulted in a dirty, murky area.  I bought some pastel pencils to acheive the detail, they make a huge difference.

I started this drawing by sketching Zack as he was ‘talking’ to my husband but worked on it from photos for the colour and details.

     

 I tried various different mediums for the following sketches; conté crayons, graphite pencil and soft pastels.  The cat above left was drawn using soft pastels, white and black.  Unfortunately the paper was too textured and I lost any detail.  All of these sketches were done on pastel paper, but I am not a huge fan as it is too textured and grainy which detracts from the drawing.  Not sure what the advantage of this type of paper could be.

I enjoyed drawing the animals and prefer them to still life drawings apart from flowers.  There seems to be more character to capture.

Exercise Fish on a plate

I really didn’t enjoy doing this piece at all and it shows in the result.  I couldn’t get the detail or shading and just hate the whole thing.  I forced myself to continue but  consider this piece a total failure.  Drawing the broad shapes was ok but the painting and shading just got the better of me.  Yuk, time to move on!!  Maybe I should wait a while and go back, working in some detail with colour pencil.

Check and log

What were the main challenges of drawing animals?

Keeping them still enough to get the main outline sketch.  Rendering the detail and also the fur, texture of them.  Capturing the character of each animal.

Which media did you enjoy using most and which did you feel were best for the subject matter and why?

Soft pastels or soft graphite pencils seemed to be the easiest media for me.  They seem apt for loose drawing and spontaneous sketching.

Where can you go to draw more animals?  Think about the sorts of places that will give you opportunities for animal drawing.  Have you tried drawing a moving animal yet?

I could go to the lake side to find ducks and swans.  We also have bison near by and some deer in an enclosed field.  We also have a few local animal farms nearby, so opportunities are quite easy to find.  I tried sketching some ducks by the lake and found this quite difficult.  The advantage is that there were quite a few of them so as one moved I could find another in the same pose.