Drawing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14

Bringing Animals to Life on Paper

In This Chapter

Shading to render realistic textures

Drawing animal portraits

Putting your animal-drawing techniques to the test with a fun project

Artists have been drawing animals since the days when men and women recorded their histories on cave walls. Surprisingly enough, the techniques used to create these drawings on rock aren’t that different from the ones you and other artists use today on paper. Whether you’re interested in drawing lifelike renditions of your own pets or you just want to capture the essence of the creatures you see at a local park or zoo in your sketchbook, you’ve come to the right place.

In this chapter, you discover strategies for making animal drawings come vibrantly alive. You find out how to capture the spirit of an animal through the posture of its body and how to create realistic textures of fur and feathers. Finally, you get the chance to practice drawing a whole animal. Although we draw a few specific animals in this chapter, you can use the techniques and strategies you find here to draw any kind of animal.

Animals rarely hold still long enough for you to tackle anything beyond quick sketches, so have ...