Animals for Fun and Practice

Sketching people, landscapes, streets and buildings, and so on has occupied most of my drawing time until not long ago. But it occurred to me that although I've done quite a few sketches of people, when it comes to animals, not so much. In the last few months I've tried to correct that.

This is a quick sketch of our two schnauzer puppies, Tillie and Stella, sleeping on a cushion. They're both still little balls of fur at the time I sketched them on my iPad Pro using Sketchbook. Although I keep a sketchbook handy most of the time, more and more a quick digital sketch is pretty simple. Whether doing a digital sketch or something more traditional, when sketching animals it pays to try hard to capture the critical things first--body shape, gesture, and so on. With this one Tillie (the white one)moved after I started, necessitating a revision. I only briefly sketched in the cushion's outline and finished that later because I wanted to capture the head and ears and the bent leg as the near puppy slept. The shading and cushion details could and did wait.

Sometimes even having a sketchbook or iPad handy isn't good enough. This is a sketch of a red-tail hawk that I saw in Florida when we were visiting there last month. In this particular case, the hawk was as tame as I've ever seen--it came up and landed on the corner of the pool enclosure where we were staying, literally six feet away. Fearing no time at all for sketching I managed to grab a camera and snap a half dozen shots from that close vantage point, using an automatic point-and-shoot digital. After I returned home I did the quick sketch to the left, simply to catch the shape of the head and beak and study the neck markings. Although the lower body was in fair focus in my quick reference snapshot, I was satisfied with keeping those parts blurred and concentrating on the eye and beak.

Of course, sometimes the only way to draw certain animals is from reference materials. You'd have a very difficult time trying to sketch a fox in the wild, for example. But this drawing is actually from a news photo of a fox in Europe who has become tame enough to associate with humans. His name is Gaspard, and from the news story he seems like a fine fellow.

Finally, unless you visit a zoo, there are animals you simply won't see in nature here in North America. Not long ago I ran across a story about what sounds like the world's largest kangaroo, who had died of old age at 12 or so. He had been publicized (at least in Australia) as "Roger the Roo," and by the news photos of this big fellow he had a physique rather like professional wrestlers--"ripped" as bodybuilders say. Here he is, from an undated photo I saw in the obituary, published by the BBC.

The ability to draw animals is an important skill for many artists and will repay the work needed to gain competence.





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