Studies from 2009 - Quadruped quick sketches

I wrote a previous note about gesture drawing for animals, but that example was about birds which are easy to sketch quickly, though it's very hard to draw them accurately or in unusual poses and the wings are a puzzle on their own. With quadrupeds even getting a basic shape right is more difficult.

At the beginning my biggest problem with quadrupeds was that I saw too many things going on - too many limbs in motion, too many lines to follow, too many masses:

When doing gesture drawing of humans the most important line is usually the backbone, and all other lines follow logically from it. Sometimes it is obvious in quadrupeds too:

But I look on purpose for weird poses where it is hard to figure out which lines are the most important for the overall shapes. Giraffes have unusually long legs, the neck is a unique feature which changes a lot the visual balance of their body, and on top of that their movements are very constrained. So trying to make giraffes look agile and not stiff is an interesting exercise.

(Warning: click for slightly NSFW giraffe)

The little figures on the right are a possible way to sketch quadruped poses considering only a few main lines and masses. I did a lot of them too and it turns out they are also a good exercise in synthesis, to train oneself to remember well the proportions and two or three key features of a species. The can be useful to study features at any level, for example to study small differences between species which look very similar, as in this example with antelope horns:

Studies from last year - Gesture drawing for animals

Gesture drawing is a classical drawing exercise which is somewhat related to the line of action concept. The idea is to sketch human figures very quickly (like 30-45 seconds), without detail but trying to capture the essence of the pose/movement. Posemaniacs.com has a very good Flash tool for that.

I wanted to do the same with animals, so I used a slideshow program to show random photos from my collection for 30-40 seconds each, and the first attempts sucked quite a lot - how can you draw an animal you have never studied before in just 30 seconds and have it not suck?

Boobies with Issues & deformed cats!

But later I go the point.

30 seconds are not enough to draw a body, you can only draw a few lines and shapes in that time. That's what gesture drawing is about - training the eye to break down poses and movement so it can quickly pick up the most important shapes and ignore the rest. It's learning to analyze a body without getting distracted by details like fur texture or colors.

Starting to figure it out?

Learning to see the individual shapes is as important as seeing the harmony of the whole body and it's even more important when you have to rely mostly on photos and videos, which is the only practical way to draw exotic animals on a regular basis. Photos are cluttered by useless details and this kind of exercise forces you to ignore it and look only at the essential stuff. Which makes it easier to learn and remember the looks of many different species.

Gesture drawing is well known in art academies but again I found almost nothing about doing this with animals. In future posts I'll review the artists I found who have studied the topic, however none of them has gone into much detail, even Glen Vilppu, who has done the most thorough studies of animal gestures so far. And nobody worked on truly exotic animals either - most artistic studies of animals are limited to horses and a handful of other common animals.