DRAWING ANIMALS 1 - A GENERAL APPROACH TO QUADRUPEDS

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Today .

Today's video is going to utilize a lot of the form , rotation and organic forms covered in my perspective .

Part six video .

If any of these topics seem unfamiliar to you , I'd suggest heading to that video first and then delving into this animal anatomy series .

In that video , I demonstrate how we can understand ellipses via their minor axis and degree as well as create forms from organic shapes .

Second part is going to be particularly important today because we can simplify a lot of the anatomy by boiling them down into two dimensional shapes which we place properly in perspective .

That being said today , we're going to take a generalized approach for sketching animals .

And then in the subsequent videos , we'll do a deeper dive into the underlying skeletal and muscular anatomy .

But today we'll get started sketching just by blocking out the major forms of the body .

So I begin by establishing a line of action .

This line just corresponds to the overall movement and pose .

Keep this part very simple and just try to boil down the entirety of the subject into a few lines .

Once that line of action is placed in , I start blocking out the major forms of the body that being the head , shoulder , girdle trunk and pelvis .

You'll notice I distinguish between the blocky bony elements such as the skull and the shoulders from the rounder forms like the neck and the barrel of the body .

I also just want to be clear that personally , I've been moving away from this very constructive approach to drawing , but I do think it's an incredibly helpful tool for comprehending a subject .

So I'd like for us to see this more as a study tool than as a means to creating a finished piece that being said , once these components are established , I'm going to add lighting and texture .

Whenever I add texture to a drawing , I'm always trying to do so in a way that complements the lighting scheme , I like to imagine my marks as placing in shapes of shadow hatching can be used to block in shapes of shadow or even taper them to create a softer edge .

It's up to you how much you want to render your drawing .

But I find it best when sketching rounded forms to emphasize the core shadow and the cast shadow , I discuss this more in depth in my video on textures .

The link is down below in the description , let's do a couple more of these form breakdowns just so you get an idea of how to do them .

Again , the idea is not necessarily to capture likeness just yet .

I'm just looking to comprehend how the major forms are twisting and turning .

And as such , that means you can kind of mix and match what sort of forms you want to use .

And it doesn't particularly matter .

So long as at the end of your sketch , you have a better understanding of how the animal sits in three dimensional space .

So all of the rounded elements like the arms and the trunk of the body are essentially modified , cylinders , understanding their minor axis and ellipse degree helps you place those in perspective .

The head , shoulder girdle and pelvis are all in alignment .

So their right and left vanishing points are the same with this next one .

I'm starting with a center line and then I'm going to build out towards the left vanishing point in order to create volume .

The form I'm using for the pelvis is a trapezoid that's extruded and then tilted forward .

The form I'm utilizing for the barrel of the body which consists of the rib cage and the abdomen is a modified organic form that's flattened at the top and it's rounder towards the front .

Then for the shoulder girdle , I'm using a similar form to the pelvis , except it's a little bit taller and rounded at the top .

What you'll notice here is that since the head is turned back , this form converges to a new set of vanishing points .

The forms of the leg tilt back and forth to reflect the natural anatomical angles .

Remember every time a cylindrical form changes its orientation .

The minor axis of the ellipses changes as well .

Although the feet will often be staggered depending on the pose , you can use their position as well to establish a sense of space .

This next sketch is done in a wide angle lens which means that the photo was actually taken closer to the subject and the distance between the vanishing points is closer .

This leads to those parallel lines converging much faster than if the photo was taken from a distance with a longer lens .

And once again , I'm utilizing the same exact forms that I did in the previous two examples .

The other effect of the wide angle lens is that the part of the subject matter that's closest to the lens will be dilated in size , which in this case , is making the skull appear larger than the pelvis .

In the following example , we have a situation where the animal is oriented directly towards the camera .

In this situation , we'll get a lot of overlapping of shapes and foreshortening .

And because it's oriented towards the camera , the wrapping lines of the trunk are going to be much wider degree ellipses referring back to that perspective video as ellipses start to orient themselves towards the camera , they become wider and degree until they become perfectly circular .

You can see that because of the foreshortening the shoulder girdle appears much closer to the pelvis than it would in the other situations .

And in this final example , the spine is bending which creates a different angle of the shoulder girdle and the pelvis .

Now that we have some understanding of the three dimensional forms , we can supplement this with some loose gesture drawings .

I'm of the mindset that your gesture drawings can actually be as structurally sound as the drawings that we did .

Previously .

Those elements we discussed such as the wrapping lines and the placement of the feet are all going to contribute to the perspective .

But our looseness of draftsmanship energy and attention to shapes is what's going to make this look more lifelike and interesting .

I know so far , I've been drawing a couple of different animals , but there's a lot of similarities between these quadrupedal mammals .

They all share pretty much the same underlying bone and muscular structures .

With the obvious difference being the size and proportion of each of these doing a lot of these loose gestures is really nice because you can kind of quickly familiarize yourself with drawing a specific animal without getting too committed to making a really nice sketch .

And now finally , I'll try to combine these two approaches together to make a drawing that I think has both structure and looseness of the gesture drawing , but also has some nice clean line work .

At the end of it , my line work is always reflective of the underlying structure .

We'll talk about this more in the next part , but I utilize internal hatching lines to show that the deltoid muscles overlapping the tricep in the arm .

Then the forearm muscles emerge from the elbow and then break out of the silhouette .

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Everybody .

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