#1,699 in Arts & photography books
Reddit mentions of The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals
Sentiment score: 2
Reddit mentions: 3
We found 3 Reddit mentions of The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals. Here are the top ones.
Buying options
View on Amazon.comor
Specs:
Height | 10.75 Inches |
Length | 8.5 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Weight | 1.15 Pounds |
Width | 0.5 Inches |
Hey! Okay, so we need to talk about reference material, proportion, and form drawing most of all, I think. Did you have a picture of a cat, or did you do this guy out of your head? This is Reddit for crying out loud, pictures of cats are on practically every other thread. Find some pictures of cats to use as reference.
Now that you've got some pictures of cats, think about breaking down their forms. By this I mean simplify them into very basic geometric shapes (cubes, cylinders, spheres, cones, etc) and build up the 3D structure of the cat.
This breakdown will help you control the relative sizes and the way that the parts connect. For example, in your picture, the skull, muzzle, neck, and ears can be broken down into a sphere, cube, cylinder and cones respectively.
If you're into drawing animals, I recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/097103141X
The water and water drops are really hard. You've got the water droplets drawn as very similar shapes. The tails should indicate the direction they're travelling in, and you shouldn't use the same shape and size for all the droplets. Drawing particle effects (water, fire, smoke) is all really tricky stuff. Again, reference is key here. This is also a pretty cool reference:
http://floobynooby.blogspot.com/2012/01/avatar-effects-guide.html
Good luck and happy drawing!
That's not too bad. I wish I had your skill at that age. Stay humble, always strive to learn and keep at it. You'll be really really good.
Since you seem to like drawing animals, here's two books that can really help understand their realistic form. It helped me at least.
Weatherly Guide to Drawing animals
and
The art of animal drawing
You need to be very familiar with the underlying skeletal/muscle structure of whatever animal you are drawing first. This will help you see the larger forms and planes that make up the animal. When drawing from life, it's hard to see these things on a super furry animal, so you have to rely in part on what you already know. Animal Anatomy for Artists by Eliot Goldfinger is a common recommendation, and a really good book for learning the bones and muscles in detail. But it's probably overkill for what you want to do. That book literally goes bone by bone, and muscle by muscle, which is really more important when you want to study movement imo. Focus more on the major anatomical structures that significantly affect the surface form. This is the book I recommend for learning the overall forms of animals. Once you have that down, you can add hair and fur on top, no problem. Those are just details that shouldn't be the focus anyway.