Wildlife Drawing: Structure & Development

Class this week brought us off the campus to our local Aqua Zoo where we had the opportunity to go all together and draw the wildlife! Animals can be tricky because of the movement and how different their anatomy can be. I for one, draw people a lot more often so human anatomy makes a lot of sense and can be more predictable, so this was a challenge for me to try and understand what these animal bodies were up to. 

It was a really fun time because the zoo keepers were so excited to have us there, they loved that we were drawing the animals that they cared for everyday. They were all very helpful and offered lots of neat animal facts. While walking through the Aqua Zoo I was impressed at how close we could get to the animals. It was almost like walking through a pet shop with how close we were, and some animals weren’t even in cages, they were behind a simple rope allowing us to get very close without visual obstructions.

Our professor gave us the instruction, while we were trying to draw all these animals as they moved around, to look for the structure, not just observation. Being able to shift your mind from observing in 2D to thinking in a 3D sense of what structures make up each animal and putting it together, constructing a drawing more than replication of what you see. 

It was really helpful to be able to think of the animals like this instead of trying to draw exactly what I saw. I instead would pick a pose and find a general shape for the animal or the line of movement and put that down on my paper first, giving me a reference for the space the animal will take up. From there I move into basic shapes and forms of the animal’s body parts and fill them in, constructing them in general terms first. After doing this I would go in and refine with details, placing them where they belong in the developed structure.

For our independent study this week we all made 2 resolved drawings of animals. This task was to be selected from our gesture sketches and focused on structural understanding beyond surface appearance. For my first sketch I decided to focus on a parrot. The curve of the beak and the long feathers make the Macaw parrot so fun to draw!

For my next drawing I decided to focus on my friend's cat. Throughout this past week I was able to go to a couple different friends’ houses who had animals to draw! One of them had 3 cats which were all very adorable and portrait worthy! The other house had a beautiful Belgian Malinois German shepherd mix dog and a huge collection of taxidermy deer and a coyote that they hunted. I of course had a great time drawing them all in my sketchbook! Here is my cat and other sketchbook drawings!

Thanks for reading along! I hope you are encouraged to go try to draw some animals! There are more animals available to draw than I thought. Some other good drawing places that I have on my list are my school’s equestrian center, pet stores, and the humane society, not to mention all the people I know who have pets!

Have a wonderful and creative day!

Christina