How to Draw Wild Animals
In addition to being dangerous, drawing wild animals from life is difficult because they're not still long enough to sketch them. That's why artists collect high-quality pictures and photos as references from which to draw. By having a camera ready to shoot different poses of wild animals from the safety of a vehicle, artists can capture the animals' personalities. Some artists visit zoos to photograph or sketch lions, giraffes, bears and other wildlife behind bars.
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Things You'll Need
- .5 mm mechanical pencil with 2B lead
- Typewriter eraser with brush on the end
- Kneaded eraser
- Electric eraser
- Bristol board drawing paper
- Reference photos
- Blending tortillons
- Tissues
Instructions
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Select good reference pictures or photos of a wild animal and carefully study the details, noting body shapes. Next, lightly sketch a basic outline of the wild animal. Don't be concerned about details at first. Consider the shapes of each body part, such as ovals, circles, blocks and triangles (see Resources below).
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Refine your drawing now that you have the basic shapes, erasing the parts of circles, blocks and other shapes not needed. Make sure proportions and the character of the animal are drawn accurately. If any feature isn't right, correct it before continuing to the next step. Unlike humans, wild animals' eyes and facial features differ among species. Also, study the animal's expression, as revealed in facial features. Just as the eyes are the window of the soul for humans, the eyes of wild animals also convey emotions--such as fear, anger and contentment--by how they're drawn.
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3
Add basic patterns within the outline. For example, if you're drawing a giraffe, add the spot patterns on the giraffe's body. Lightly sketch the shapes of body contours within the outline, such as eyes, nose and other facial features. Note the pattern in which fur flows on mammals such as bears or the direction of feathers if drawing a wild bird.
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Add tones. The key to making a wild animal appear as realistic as possible lies in how you apply tones, shading it. Study light and dark tones. Then lightly shade in the darkest areas using your mechanical pencil. Apply medium gray tones using less strokes than when drawing dark tones.
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5
Blend tones. Blending body parts converts harshly drawn outline shapes to realistic features. Using a blending tool, such as a tortillon, blend out tones until they are smooth, such as the coat of a wolf. The key to blending with pencils is gentle blending of tone from dark to light. In other words, avoid choppiness, which disrupts tone, applying pencil marks close together. You can also use a tissue to blend.
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Study your reference drawing, noting where light tones are against darks and dark tones are against lights. Then lift out highlights with the tiny tip of the kneaded eraser. A battery-operated eraser is excellent for depicting white specs on wild animals such as deer.
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Continue the process of blending tones and lifting out lights until the drawing looks as realistic as possible.
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Tips & Warnings
Draw using a grid if you're not that confident in drawing freehand (see Resources below). After making a basic outline of your wild animal, hold up your drawing to a mirror. If there is something that isn't drawn correctly, you'll see it more clearly when the drawing is in reverse. Use several reference pictures as well as the original photo of the animal. Study instructional art books by artist Lee Hammond, who's known for her blending technique to render realistic pencil portraits of wild animals, as well as people, landscapes and still life drawings (see Resources below).
Place your subject closer to the top of your page than to the bottom. When drawing your wild animal's eyes, be sure to leave a catch light, which is the tiny white speck that's partially in the pupil.
Resources
- Photo Credit Venice Kichura
