Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Animals: Simple Techniques for Creating Animals with Personality – Includes 66 Step-by-Step Tutorials

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Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Animals presents practical and creative techniques for drawing and painting animals in a variety of mediums and styles, from realistic to cartoon.

With accessible, encouraging guidance from Amarilys Henderson—artist, popular online instructor, and author of Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces—explore: Basic Supplies. Learn about the sketching and painting mediums you’ll use in your work, including watercolor, inks, gouache, and markers.Essential Elements. Discover the scope of animals’ sizes, shapes, and features, from nose to tail.Emotion and Expression. Learn how to adjust basic shapes, postures, and poses to convey a range of animal emotions and expressions, from sly and sneaky to angry to curious.Animal Tutorials. Draw and paint more than 30 animals—from favorites like horses, bunnies, and birds to exotics like cheetahs, rhinos, and koalas—and investigate 11 different “style twists,” including using color in unique ways, enhancing cuteness, and playing with other mediums. As you discover your creative options, you’ll find that working small is an easy way to relieve pressure and open yourself to play as well as to learning the techniques and approaches that Amarilys shares in this book.

Find your favorite way to portray a variety of animals, from cute little critters to big, strong beasts, in Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Animals!

From the Publisher

Accessible, encouraging guidance from Amarilys Henderson—artist, popular online instructor, and author of Drawing and Painting Expressive Little Faces

Drawing and painting animals—it seems simple, right? But take a minute to think about it. Which animals? There are so many crawling, slithering, and walking on two or more legs! The world of animals is vast, diverse, and complex, and animals look, behave, and move in a variety of ways. Their virtues and personalities endear us. They pique our curiosity and, as artists, they trigger our desire to understand them better with our pencils and express them deeply with our brushes.

ANIMAL FORMS

Most of us spend our sketching time looking at a reference image or a live model as our pencil follows the lines we see, inch by inch or centimeter by centimeter. When we stop to consider our work, we realize we’ve got adjustments to make! The proportions are all over the place. The balance is off. Our model looks wonky. Our sketches can often be altered to be more true-to-life, but the “rescue mission” stage will likely leave you deflated.

I want to open your eyes to a way of understanding a subject as you see it. The first step is to see animals as a collection of shapes or forms. American mid-century artists focused on shapes of flat color. This approach helped inform how I look at subject matter, and I am so grateful.

Using cut paper or solid blocks of gouache forces us to think creatively about what is before our eyes. Details must be lost and nuances in forms are reduced to the essential. Minimalism led to an even greater exaggeration of diminishing a subject to a single shape, literally cutting dispensable curves or parts.

ACTIVITY: SINGLE-SHAPE ANIMALS

What if you had to represent an animal with a single shape? It’s a challenge! Grab some construction paper and a magazine featuring animals and try a few! Make three animals by using a single shape of cut paper for its body mass. Then, add a few marker lines to bring them to life. Pushing your creative brain is a great way to grasp the subject.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED Paper in solid colors Scissors Markers

ACTIVITY: DRAWING EYES

Look up some animals and only draw their eyes. Draw the pair or just one as I have here. Select different animals to appreciate the contrast, or draw a few similar animals and sharpen your eye to subtle distinctions.

ACTIVITY: DRAWING FUR, HAIR & SKIN TEXTURE

How do you take what you’ve seen with your eyes and interpret it? Hair and fur can be so full: we can render each strand or we can selectively sketch hints of it. For either approach, apply more pressure to the base of each hair and taper your hand pressure if it thins to the ends. If the fur is thick and coarse, you won’t need to let up much. If the hairs are thin, use light pressure. Notice the direction the hair grows, curls, and waves, working in rows as you fill in areas. A few strokes of fur here and there may be all you need to suggest texture.

ACTIVITY: DRAWING NOSES

Draw a few noses and reflect on the comparisons below. Draw a set of nostrils or the entire snout. A nose by any other name is still a nose. But have you considered these options?

Wet or drySmooth or porousFlat, angled, or curvedRound or long nostrilsLarge or small in overall sizeProtrudingSimply nostrils

Whiskers add a lot to the animal’s cuteness. They may look full or sparse, dark or light, long or short. They’re commonly along the sides of the nose, but notice them above the eyes, chin, or toward the outer edges of the cheeks…and sometimes in all those places on a single animal!

ACTIVITY: DRAWING FEET

Paws, claws, toes, and talons! They’re often rugged to withstand a walk in less-than-smooth surfaces and could have several textures rolled into one small area. When drawing feet, look out for these features:

ToesPaw padsClawsNailsFurry or fleshySoft or rough featuresHoovesCleftsThumb-like parts

EMOTION & EXPRESSION

Animals show what’s going on in their minds quite readily. Observe a family pet and you’ll notice they’re not always an even keel of emotion. Watch a group or herd and notice how personalities pop up among the group.

Paint the Tree Frog With his distinguishing markings, it’s easy to give this tree frog his signature look. The lime green, the red eyes, the orange toes are all simple—and adorable—shapes!

COOL COLORS

We’ll start with green! The green sections connect all the body parts together. Next, blue serves as shading and holds its own patch on the body. The belly is blue and white; the blue is a curvy, disconnected zigzag motif. A few dots are near the bottom as the color dissipates. Let dry (A).

WARM COLORS | 1

Who can resist painting those bright red eyes? Paint the orange toes with a small brush by outlining them within the lines of the feet. You’ll be left with a bit of white within. A wet brush is used in these pockets to connect the color to the page, creating a softer color and sleek skin. A little bit of yellow transitions the green into the white belly area.

WARM COLORS | 2

We’ll go full circle back to green and use it in its purest form to add shading lines around the legs, smile, and nostrils. If green is too light, use blue. Outline the edges of the green areas (B).

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quarry Books (August 24, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0760370745
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0760370742
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.55 x 0.6 x 10 inches