Draw and Paint your Pet

When you focus more specifically on a portrait drawing of an animal you must observe it carefully, looking for the component shapes. The head is always a good place to start, so make a study of it. Simplify the exercise by using basic geometric shapes such as circles, ovals, cylinders and cones, and forget about detailed outlines. Place yourself at different positions around your subject so that you are looking at it from all angles. Figure out if the basic outline of the head full frontal is square or round. It may change as you move to a different viewpoint – a head can be cone-shaped if you look at it in profile, for instance. Practise these head shapes for different animals in your sketchbook over and over again, drawing them routinely until the pencil becomes an extension of your hand.

Remember that each animal is an individual and that you must observe and consider it as such. Getting the overall shape of the head right will enable you to add further guidelines for the features. The animal’s features, too, can be drawn as geometric shapes at this stage and unless you observe them correctly you will have difficulty in making a realistic portrait. You can use a triangle within the circular head shape to line up the eyes and the nose, and the ears can be just simple little triangle shapes.

BODY SHAPES

Take a look at the body now and figure out whether it is cylinder shaped, oval or otherwise. Again the body of an animal will look different when it is sitting or lying down from when it is standing.

Then move on to the limbs. They too are made up of a series of smaller shapes. A paw can be a lot easier to depict if you first of all draw an oval shape, closely observing the particular cat or dog. Although paws can look fairly simple, they can be tiresomely tricky to get right at times and if you use this principle of basic geometric shapes you will have a foundation on which to add detail later.

Some knowledge of animal anatomy will also be helpful in enabling you to place shapes to represent the muscles, for instance, which give the animal its build and control its movement. By drawing these shapes initially as a routine feature of starting a pet portait you will find that your powers of observation increase too and you will be recognizing and placing shapes more quickly and accurately the more you draw.

It is also helpful when you are planning a composition to place a shape around the animal. Drawing a cat or dog inside an triangle can enable you to see the negative spaces of the shapes, helping you to check the overall proportions.

Use shapes to indicate joints, hindquarters and paws. Draw a shape around the animal to confirm the outline of the pose.

MOVING SHAPES

Sketching moving animals can be quite daunting at first, but it is useful to do so to increase your general observational and drawing skills. Visit the park and notice the dogs on their walks. Your outlines need not be detailed. Just get used to sketching the cones and circles that encompass the head, and the triangles, say, for the ears and quickly pencil in the bodyline while the dog is running or bounding about. You will have to be quick because the shapes will be constantly changing.

Horses can be especially challenging. They look complicated to draw, but if you remember that their bodies are simply a series of shapes in motion and in different positions then you will find that your time spent drawing them is both rewarding and enjoyable.

Take yourself off to the local zoo! Have some fun sketching the elephants or giraffes. Take a big sketchbook and observe those lovely simple shapes. You can use cylinders for the different sections of the legs and a big oval shape for the body.

Keep your sketching up every day. If you continue to follow this method of drawing it will soon become second nature to you and you will make progress as an artist.

Make rapid sketches of moving animals, thinking only about the changing shapes you see. This will increase your skills and confidence.

WATERCOLOUR TECHNIQUES

Painting a picture for the first time can be overwhelming for a beginner, but if you know how to use your materials the process becomes much simpler. I use two kinds of media – watercolour paints and watercolour pencils. In this chapter I shall introduce the basic techniques for using these. It is vital that you become familiar with these techniques so that you can achieve the results you are striving for when drawing and painting pets.

The main point I want to stress is that you must expect to put in a great deal of practice. If you are willing to dedicate part of your day to drawing and painting then you are bound to improve.

USING WATERCOLOUR

Work always with clean jars of water at the ready and wash your brushes regularly after use. Always use small amounts of colour, well diluted, and when applying it onto paper use your brush to brush the water and pigment until there is no excess left on the surface. If you apply too much a little pool will develop, leaving an unsightly hard edge when dry. One way to avoid a hard edge if this does happen is to use a sponge or tissue to soak up the colour.

The two main techniques in watercolour are wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. Wet-on-wet means applying colour on an already wet surface and wet-on-dry means, of course, painting on a dry surface. If you are completely new to this medium then I would suggest that you start by familiarizing yourself in painting wet-on-dry pictures.

Wet-on-dry

This method involves building up layers of colour with a slightly stronger pigment, or sometimes the same mix that was laid down before, allowing each layer to dry completely.

WET-ON-DRY This technique is an effective way of building up tone. It is used here to create the form of a cat’s ear. A first wash is applied over the whole ear area, then left to dry. With a second layer some shape is created. When this is dry a darker layer is added to complete the effect.

When starting a painting wet-on-dry I deal with the tones first of all. Take a look at your subject and notice where the shadows are. You can create these beautiful effects with watercolour with just a little diluted pigment. Paint your first layer carefully, then allow this to dry completely. Then wash out your brush, put clean water in your jar and apply the next layer of colour, keeping it watery, though with slightly more pigment. Continue in this way, adding wet layers on dry ones, until you have reached the tone you require.

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