How to Draw a Real Monkey

Video Transcript

"O'kay folks in this clip I'm going to teach you how to draw a real monkey. What I would personally do is I would start with the eyes. Once you have those you can kind of move on in a very effective way because they are the building blocks of the face in my opinion and the face is a really great place to start if you are drawing a creature of any kind. Now one of the keys to drawing a monkey is it has to look remotely life like so we are going to come in here and we're going to give it you know, a little bit of life to its eyes and drawing eyes are kind of a tricky thing. You have to basically create, in order to give an eye life you have to give it a certain amount of sparkle, a certain amount of just inner life to it and that is something that basically can't be taught. You just have to practice it until it basically looks right but you kind of can see what I mean. Leaving a little bit of white in the center helps but really it is something you just kind of have to feel out for yourself because it is very very hard to master. You are going to kind of want to, we're going to draw a chimp here as our real monkey so you are going to kind of follow the eyes with what would be the eyebrow area. They don't really have eyebrows per say obviously but they have definition around the eyes for sure and that is definitely the part of the face that isn't furry and then kind of come down here and draw the nostrils and just kind of you want to define in a way to show that they are monkeys and monkeys especially chimps have very distinct facial features. Come down there and draw its mouth and chin. Now of course drawing a monkey is not the toughest animal in the world, they are fairly, we see a lot of them so they are obviously not uncommon animals so you should be able to, a lot of this you should be able to draw sort of from memory. Come down here and draw the ears. A lot of times I would suggest if you are drawing any kind of a creature it is in the animal kingdom obviously you should have a lot of visual references. When it comes to monkeys it is actually not a bad one to try and tackle even without visual references because it is nice to be able to see how much information you have retained because that is a large part of being an artist is being able to study the world around you and retain that information and be able to create your own drawings and not obviously copy directly from photographs or if you are lucky enough to have a chimpanzee somewhere nearby. You don't necessarily do, I mean that might be fun actually drawing from real life but I think the best way to draw a creature of any kind is to really try and take them in visually beforehand and then allow yourself to just let your imagination film the pieces for you kind of like a puzzle later on. That to me is exciting. Now what I am essentially doing here is I'm just essentially going to fill in the rest of the body here and not a whole lot of detail but just to kind of show you how I would go with it and basically what I would suggest is start with the face first and once you master that then you are well on your way to doing the rest because the rest of the body is you know, you gain a certain degree of confidence once you have mastered something like the face on an animal or the head of any kind of animal so really try to get the face down and the body will sort of kind of come later. Work on really capturing your face and once you come in and are able to do the body later on make sure you are very clear with the pose, very distinct with your lines. There. You've got yourself a nice little monkey."