How to draw animals correctly

There is probably not a single person on earth who does not love animals. This especially applies to children. One of a child’s favorite activities is drawing, and it is no coincidence that the main characters in their drawings are animals and birds; interest in them instills a love for all living things from a young age. I'm not an exception. The topic of my research is drawings of animals using templates. I chose this topic because I really like drawing animals. But it’s not always possible to draw correctly and accurately what I had in mind, because the structure of many of them, in my opinion, is difficult to perceive. As it turned out, this work also causes difficulties for my classmates, so I decided to find a way to make the process of drawing animals easier.

In this case, I will consider the method of drawing animals using templates with moving parts, using the example of a horse, since this animal interests me very much and causes some difficulties when depicting it. This work fascinated me. I hope this method will make my work easier.

To learn how to draw animals, you need to have a good knowledge of their body structure.

To achieve this, artists study plastic anatomy and draw a lot from life. But a giraffe or an elephant may not always be next to us, and an ordinary horse can not be seen often.

But if you still decide to draw an animal, the easiest option is to look at those that live in our apartments. Little friends of a little man - kittens and puppies - are in constant motion. The parrot cannot calm down in its cage. A hamster is busy near its nest. Decorative fish scurry behind the glass of the aquarium. There are not many animals in the world that are ready to pose for a person for a long time, like a snail or a turtle. Therefore, before you learn to draw animals from life, learn to observe animals, their movements and habits. All this will help in the future when drawing directly from life.

First, observe the animals (this can be done at the zoo, or you can make your task easier with the help of ordinary pictures and photographs taken from books), so that, by carefully peering at their body shapes and habits, try to find analogies in everyday life: this will help you draw the selected animal.

The fact is that animals are very rarely at rest.

It is better to start drawing not from an animal, but from an object similar to it, while looking for all the details of the similarity. Please note that in this task, external similarity (analogy) is more important and preferable to functional similarity.

In the process of observing animals, try to memorize details, their shape, quality and proportional relationships.

One of the simple ways to draw animals is the “follow me step by step” method, or as it is also called step-by-step drawing. The "step by step" method brings satisfactory results, even when the meaning of the action is not fully understood by the child. As a result, pride in what you have accomplished will help increase interest in drawing.

Step-by-step drawing is when the whole is formed step by step from individual geometric shapes.

This method helps at the initial stage and is recommended for beginning artists. It’s best to start by taking a sample that shows the animal that interests you step by step, and try to copy it, imitating every detail. Imitation is a necessary prerequisite for the development of creative abilities. By imitation, we learn about our capabilities. And only then we can use them for creativity.

Drawing a horse using templates

Despite the efforts of me and my classmates, many of us still had difficulties with the step-by-step depiction of the horse, sometimes it turned out with a body that was too long, sometimes with short legs bent in the wrong directions. It is for these reasons that it was decided to resort to templates with moving parts.

At first, modeling the shape of the animal and drawing it according to templates gives good results. Let's choose some animal, for example a horse, and sort of “take it apart” into parts, making templates that can be connected together with wire to create the effect of movement.

Thus, we should have templates for the head, neck, torso, tail and four legs. In this case, each leg should be made up of two parts: above the knee and below the knee, which will allow for more movement.

We suggest using the templates to fold and then draw the animals in various movements.

To get an image of an animal on a sheet, you can simply circle all parts of the template, while being careful not to move the parts out of their places. In this case, the animal will turn out (and will always turn out) in the size of the template, and this is not always good. Sometimes you need to draw a figure a little larger or a little smaller. Therefore, it is better to accustom yourself not to outline the template, but to draw directly looking at it, as if from life.