Dog drawing sketch how to#

Lift your tracing paper off and look at the stick shapes. Your image will look something like this. For the paws add triangles and for the head you can add an oval at this stage if you like. Try and ignore the fur and imagine your dog has been for a trim. For the head create a “cross” with two lines to give you a sense of width and height. Imagine you are only allowed to use lines on your paper. Take your tracing paper and lay it over your image. You’re not lazy per se! My opinion, however, is that by learning the basics through the art of really looking at your object and taking a little more time to understand will refine your drawing practise and shortcut time and frustration later on. In part, I agree with him, although there is no argument to say you shouldn’t just get on and draw and develop your independent style with or without anatomy knowledge. Salvador Dali amusingly was known to have said that “if you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of colour, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius…” Although we are not armed with x-ray vision we can put together basic skeletal frameworks on paper through which we can build our picture. More importantly, when it comes to dogs and humans, understanding how the anatomy of your subject is put together will fast track your ability to draw. This exercise reminds me how important looking at an object is. …And, no, you’re not going to trace the entire dog! So often when we start to draw we get going with the head at the risk of not understanding how the entire body fits together. I’m a big advocate that with anything you start to draw you capture the entire shape of the image on paper first before starting in on the details. If you are a complete drawing beginner or keen to start using the correct technique, you will need to get a sheet of tracing paper or greaseproof paper for this exercise, as well as an image of the dog you’d like to draw. The Stick Dog Skeleton (for the complete beginner!) Faces and Adding Details to Your Dog Drawing. You can read more about their adventures here. My good friend Malc, is a beautiful Blue Merle Try Border Collie who belongs to Paul aka the Bald Hiker.

We have a great model for today’s sketching demo. Faces and adding details to your drawing.Stick dog skeleton (adopt if a beginner.).My approach to drawing dogs are adopting the following stages

This, at the end of the day, will support you get to sketching dogs “live.”

Dog drawing sketch how to#

For the purposes of getting started, however, I’d like to show you how to approach drawing from a photograph and the stages you can work through. I will touch on this a little later in the post. Sketching a dog live is a different proposition to working from a photograph. For the record, I like to use the stick man analogy for drawing a human. On a sketch class a few months ago someone asked whether I would approach drawing a dog in the same way in which I explained how to draw a human figure. I must admit, although I have sketched our canine friends before, I’ve never spent too long thinking about whether or not there is a logical process to approaching how to draw this animal.Īs usual, if I was to delve into a step by step approach I would advocate that you sketch a dog in layers! After all, it possesses an anatomy as does a human figure, with muscles included, but with the addition of fur and different facial features. There are over 450 recognised breed of dogs across the globe so there are plenty of them to choose from to fill a sketchbook. How difficult is it to draw dogs, and can you do it in 4 easy steps?