How to Quick Draw Animals

I listed this as Easy, because the process is actually fast and easy. Whether your drawings resemble your photo reference or not is a matter of practice, but drawing fast is a way to get in much more practice than slow careful rendering!

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Photo reference, yours or one with permission from the photographer to draw from it.
• Derwent or Conte Sketch pencils in red, black and white, or Conte crayons
• Kneaded eraser
• Sketchbook or sketch pad with acid free art paper
• A clock to check the time, stopwatch is good if you have one.
• Can of spray workable matte fixative.

1. Warm up with some loose simple strokes on the page. Sketch some textures like crosshatching, scribbling or smudging, to get used to establishing values very fast. Don't time this, just fiddle around for a while till your hand is very used to your sketch pencils or Conte crayons.
2. Look close at your photo references and pick one before starting the timer. This is when to decide composition, where you will put the animal on the page. Don't take too long thinking about it, just pick a reference where the animal will fill most of the space you have marked off. Work fairly small. I do these as ACEOs, 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" and have precut pieces of art paper that size to work on. If you're using a regular sketch pad, you may want to sketch out a 3" x 4" area or 4" x 6" area, or just work big and fill the page with sweeping arm motions. Do it your way, I just like the ACEO size. (ACEO means Art Cards Editions & Originals, these are original art the size of trading cards that get sold or swapped like trading cards.) Sketching the outline of your drawing area does not count as part of your Five Minute Art drawing time.
3. First lines for the tiger face quick sketch. Establish the basic lines of your animal. I'm doing a tiger's face and shoulders for this demonstration, using red and black Conte sketch pencils on white watercolor paper, ACEO size. You use Conte crayons, pastel pencils, Derwent sketch pencils, Prismacolor sketch pencils or charcoal pencils, mix and match, just have a red and a black one and white if you're going to use tinted paper. My first minute is spent getting these basic lines in, using red since the stripes will be in black. I scribbled some values but not all of them, you don't have to do this at this stage but I sometimes do.
4. Black line basics including tiger's eyes and stripes I'm timing each pass to the second because I need to halt, scan and describe what I'm doing. The next step is to do any black detail that is structural. Make sure all the parts are where they need to be. Eyeball it. Guesstimate. Try for good proportions and don't worry if they are not exact. Practice is what makes these look good -- if you're a beginner, you'll get some that come out well and others that don't. Do not erase any bad lines. Just do the right line next to it and remember which is which. That's part of the charm of quick sketching. I did some stripes, but simplified the stripes from my reference by a lot. Tiger stripes, leopard spots and so on do not have to be gotten exactly. Just get the general pattern and direction.
5. Red areas shaded heavily or softly, smudging used. I spent a little less than a minute getting all those stripes in. Work fast. You can see on the last example that I got the tiger's eyes a bit large and he looks scruffy. That's fine. This is a sketch, not a final polished painting. Shade your animal solidly where any brown or red markings are strong with the red pencil. Shade lightly with the black pencil for shadows. Leave white for white. You can smudge to smooth the lighter shading, just don't go as heavy while you're drawing. Spend one or two minutes doing this shading.
6. Five minute Quick Sketch of a tiger by Robert A. Sloan Finish the black details and shading. Add any whiskers the animal may have. I put black whiskers on this tiger for visibility. If you missed a white area and covered it, shape a kneaded eraser and press it on the white spot, then peel off, repeatedly. Don't rub, that pushes the pigment into the paper. Lighten it and then go over it with a white pencil. Put catchlight in the eyes with a white pencil if you forgot to go around the catchlight, as I did. Get the pink of the nose by going over the solid red nose with the white without lifting off any of the red. Touch up any reds or blacks that faded from drawing over them or handling them. Sign yours with your own initials and mark the year next to your initials for a signature. Spray with workable fixative.

Tips & Warnings

• If you don't like your drawing, do it again, as many times as it takes to get it the way you want it. Beginners won't get the results I did -- but you will if you draw it 100 times spending only five minutes for each try!
• Be sure to use the timer. It's too easy to get distracted by details and spend fifteen or twenty minutes on a drawing and still get the proportions wrong. Start over if it's incomplete within your five minutes.
• Try drawing the same animal or species from more than one different photo reference.
• Draw a familiar animal that you see often or like so much that you're always looking at its picture. If you like tigers, draw them lots. If you like dogs, draw your dog.
• Draw the same animal from imagination, from life and from a photo. Compare your results!
• Quick drawing can give the skills to do life drawing before animal subjects get up and move.
• Try one-minute gesture drawings and leave those unfinished when they are, if you have trouble finishing under five minutes. After one minute drawings, five minutes feels like a long time!
• Whenever possible, use your own photo references. Your memory of taking the picture helps make the drawing even better.
• Be sure to date your drawings. Early ones may look crummy, but if you do this often, you'll see your progress looking back when you get discouraged.
• Ignore all background elements or represent them only with a line, smudge or squiggle. Pay attention to the animal more than the space.
• With practice, your drawings will be a useful reference for doing serious painting or fine drawing! Five minute sketches are sometimes better than photos for designing a good painting. So don't give up just because they look rough and may have mistakes, just keep doing lots of them!
• When your sketches start coming out recognizable every time, try Quick Drawing as a party trick! Bring animal photos to let your friends choose references.
• Draw at least one Five Minute Sketch every day, you will inevitably get very good at drawing!
• Try still life objects like flowers, cans, coffee cups and vases too, with the same timer. Pay attention to shadows and light on these simple objects.
• Don't try to erase bad lines. Leave them in and work over them. Lighten areas only at the very end and do that by lifting and drawing over with white, very fast.
• Don't try to get it perfect. Get it down rough and try for recognizability more than precision.
• Do not use spray workable matte fixative in an unventilated area, take your art outside or near a fan or air conditioner to use it.
• Do not smoke or have open flame near a spray can of workable matte fixative or spray paint or anything else like that.
• Don't throw out your bad sketches. Date them and save them. They will cheer you up when you feel discouraged later and compare them to what you got discouraged with, you can see your progress.