Part 6 ➤ Drawing Animals and People 260 Bulking Them Up Once you are acquainted with an animal’s basic shapes and gestures, you can begin to add some form and bulk to your drawing. Even a delicate deer or a slender bird’s leg has some form. Look at where shapes on the animal over- or underlap. As with inanimate objects, the way one part goes over or under another defines the shapes and how they fit together. Use tone, and your experience with it, to shade some of the main muscle and body shapes and how they meet. Lauren’s students use tone to shade and highlight animal muscle and body shapes. Fur and Feathers, Skin and Scales Snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails are only a few of the reasons you will want to add texture to your animal drawings. 261 Chapter 20 ➤ It’s a Jungle Out There—So Draw It! Your practice with marks, tonal charts with different textures, and a willingness to try out some new marks will pay off here. A sensitivity to the individual animal and its unique qualities is a good start. Think about the conditions a particular animal has to live in, how they live, how they feed or hunt, what the dangers are, and how they have to adapt. Try to use your thoughts as you render the fur, feathers, skin, and scales. Being sensitive to an animal’s unique qualities, practicing with different textures, and a willingness to ex- periment will pay off with realistic animal drawings. Two of Lauren’s students try their hands at a rabbit and a dog. Go Out Where They Are You will find animals to draw the minute you go out into your yard, or sit at your window. Your new drawing subjects will greet you everywhere you go, so be ready to grab your sketchbook! Your Backyard and in the Neighborhood Our backyards are full of animal subjects—birds, butterflies, squirrels, chipmunks, as well as frogs, toads, lizards, snakes, and snails. Because they are busy with their own lives, they are Part 6 ➤ Drawing Animals and People 262 disinclined to pose for you, but you can make quick sketches to capture first the action and gesture, then the proportion, shape, and form. If you live in the country and can sit quietly in your yard, you may be lucky enough to spot deer, a fox, even a coyote; the big guys like bears and mountain lions, you should probably draw from inside. Animal subjects are as close as your backyard. How does your animal subject deter- mine or relate to your drawing’s composition? Add the human element, and you’ve got something wonderful! 263 Chapter 20 ➤ It’s a Jungle Out There—So Draw It! Field and Stream, Mountain and Lake All the pretty places that you may think of for landscape drawings are also great for animal studies. The seashore, for example, offers a constantly changing mix of shells and seashore life. Some of that life you can even bring home to work on later, while some of it (shells, for example) will have to stay outside or be soaked in a little mild bleach to clean it. When your mate wants to go fishing, don’t stay home; take your sketchbook and draw the fish, seashore life, or water birds. The shore can offer up an interesting array of still life subjects—both living and inert. After that oceanscape, do some studies of the smaller creatures and objects the scene holds within it. Shells are a particularly good subject for practicing how to render texture, while also mastering some challenging shapes. Natural History Museums and Centers At the natural history museum, you will find everything you can think of, from a look under a microscope to a dinosaur’s skeleton, as well of lots of books to study. Knowing roughly how an animal’s skeleton works will make those action and gesture lines mean more. The business of adding form and weight will come more easily the more you study, so check it out. Part 6 ➤ Drawing Animals and People 264 Farms, Stables, and Parks Go out and draw the chickens, ducks, cows, goats, pigs, donkeys, horses, ponies—and don’t forget all the babies. Drawing domestic animals is a great way to practice drawing animals in relation to each other. When you draw more than one of the same animal, you begin to discover how the animal moves according to its particular anatomy, and how to render dif- ferent positions convincingly. With time, a certain arch of the neck or turn of the ear can become second-nature to your drawing hand. Practice drawing animal skeletons—wherever you find them. Take a trip to the local natural history museum, if need be, or copy them out of natu- ral science books and magazines. Skeletons can really help you un- derstand the foundation of a living creature’s form, as well as its nat- ural actions and ges- tures. 265 Chapter 20 ➤ It’s a Jungle Out There—So Draw It! Zoos, Circuses, and Animal Petting Parks A zoo is a great place to draw. You have it all there—not just the wild animals, but their habitats as well. You’ll also find gardens, trees, walkways, arches, fences, water, fountains, kids, parents, lovers, and, for your comfort and pleasure, restrooms and food nearby. They may even have Starbucks by now. Get your drawing equipment and go camp out for a day. Then you can do it all— and draw it, too. Safaris Safaris can be close to home or the adventure of a lifetime. Almost any trip can be turned into a part-time safari. It’s more a change in your attitude than the altitude. If you can’t get as far as you’d like, repair to a zoo or a museum. If you get the chance to try Tibet or a jaunt in the Australian outback, when it comes to your sketchbook, don’t leave home without it! Animal Portraits An animal portrait can be a casual sketch that captures the person- ality of the animal, but often it is an attempt to get a more formal treatment and likeness. Draw animals in groups to discover how their shape and gesture resonates when there’s more than one. How do animal groups inform your drawing’s composition? What about putting animals into your land- scape? Think about the positive and negative space relationship when drawing animals in groups. Back to the Drawing Board You will find lots of reference ma- terial out there: books, magazines, stock photos, clip art, and Inter- net photos, to name a few. They can be handy, but will not be the best way to learn to see and draw. Looking at a flat image is not the way to practice shape and form. Even detail is best seen for real and then drawn. Use the world of reference and photos only when you really need them, and try to see your way rather than copying the flatness. Part 6 ➤ Drawing Animals and People 266 To do an animal portrait, start with the basics: gesture, proportion, and form. Then add as much detail as you feel you can see. For rendering more exotic animals from life, instead of from books, try visiting the circus or zoo. You’ll be practicing new animal shapes and forms, while ex- ploring other fun and interesting drawing challenges, such as the tents shown in this illustration. Look at what happens when you draw the animal using texture as the tech- nique that illuminates the defining shapes. Here, you see a bear and two badgers. When studying animal forms, try to capture just the shape to tell you what animal is being rendered. Pay attention to positive and negative spaces. Which animals do you see here? 267 Chapter 20 ➤ It’s a Jungle Out There—So Draw It! Problems in Portraiture When your pet will sit, but not for a portrait, what then? You can wait for a sleeping sub- ject, or you can work on a series of regular poses the animal often strikes, adding a bit of shape, form, and detail as you can see it. If your pet won’t sit for you, you expect an elephant to do it? You might be surprised at a zoo and find that a wild animal will be a willing subject. Many of them spend afternoons in relative re- pose, so if you can find a pose you like, you might get lucky. A Bit on Materials and Techniques Our focus has been on seeing and drawing animals, including the gesture, proportion, shapes, and form that make each species unique. Detail is the textures and patterns, and the colors and sur- face tones that are particular or peculiar to that animal—from the soft blotchy fur of a fawn, to the smooth pelt of a seal, thick fur of a husky, slippery skin of a frog, rough hide of a buffalo, shiny scales of a fish, or the horny plates of that rhino on safari. Experimenting with all your materials and trying new ones as you see them is the best way to expand your vocabulary of marks and textures. Look at someone else’s work (ask them if you can), or just stand there and try to imagine how they made a certain tone or texture. The more you practice yourself, the easier you will find it to identify a particular kind of mark or material. As always, let the real seeing and drawing of the animal come first. Back to the Drawing Board Photographs, as a reference, can certainly help, and sometimes they are the only way to get what you want. But please don’t try to learn to draw from them; they are already flat and your drawings will follow suit, unless you have drawn from life and have enough practice to be able to “see” and draw three- dimensional shape and form. Try to use the photos for detail only. Experiment with differ- ent materials and tex- tures to see what works best for the animal you’re trying to convey. Part 6 ➤ Drawing Animals and People 268 Animals in Your Drawings If you took our advice and went out in your yard, took that fishing trip, or made that day trip to the zoo, you probably have a lot of animal drawings now. Some of them are sketches and some of them might already include some surroundings, so you are partway there. Putting them, or drawing them into, a landscape as an addition takes a bit more planning and attention to scale. Scale and Detail, Indoors or Out Animals inside are usually easy to place because the scale is easy to judge. If you can already draw the chair your dog or cat is sitting in, adding your pet will require only a clear draw- ing of the animal, or what you can see of it, which can be the problem. Look carefully at where limbs are tucked underneath and how the body might be curled up in a comfortable position. Then draw what you see. Like Odin, Lauren’s dog, all animals have their favorite chairs. Draw them there for a realistic likeness. Detail and Scale, Close Up or Far Away Outside is another story. Scale as it indicates size and distance is important to your consid- eration of animals in the landscape. The most common example is a seascape, with seagulls that are supposed to be flying above but instead seem to be looming out of proportion to everything else in the drawing. Practice in measuring against a base unit in your view will help keep those birds where they belong. If you are trying to emphasize an animal as the central point of interest, treat it like a por- trait, with the landscape in the background. In the next chapter, we’ll take the next logical step, and show you how you can have human animals in your drawings, too. Chapter 20 ➤ It’s a Jungle Out There—So Draw It! Your Sketchbook Page Try your hand at practicing the exercises you’ve learned in this chapter. . magazines, stock photos, clip art, and Inter- net photos, to name a few. They can be handy, but will not be the best way to learn to see and draw. Looking at a flat image is not the way to practice. great way to practice drawing animals in relation to each other. When you draw more than one of the same animal, you begin to discover how the animal moves according to its particular anatomy, and. shapes and how they fit together. Use tone, and your experience with it, to shade some of the main muscle and body shapes and how they meet. Lauren’s students use tone to shade and highlight animal