In preparation for heading to Fota tomorrow, @ysweeneylsad sent us a couple of videos to watch about studying and drawing live animals.
The first one was by Aaron Blaise whos also known as "creature art teacher" online. In this video he explains how he prefers to draw animals in person out in the wild as you get to study them better than you would from photos and a better feel for how they're structured and proportioned. He seems to mostly draw gestures in pen, specifically ball point pens and brush pens. He talks about how sometimes (especially on that trip) he went to a farm/zoo to sketch and got chances to draw a variety of animals; from leopards to wolves and bears. He talks about how good it is to have as many rough sketches for future reference and ideas rather than focusing on a few high quality detailed works.
He really encourages everyone to go out and draw animals from their habitats in this video.
In this next video he talks about "essentials of animal drawing" which consists of stuff such as anatomy and how to draw animals from your head.
He mentions our "visual library" often, this is a term I've heard from people at college so its a familiar word. He talks about how its good to know what animals you will be drawing because that allows you to brush up on your animal anatomy. This is similar to something I have tried to do, especially knowing that I struggle with drawing animals.
You can see in one of my previous posts my attempt at practicing sketching animal shapes and seeing if I could figure out how their body is structured underneath. He talks about how rather than memorizing each animal specifically, he memorizes each of their heads, legs, bodies and such in terms of shapes as you can usually mix and match, for example all four legged animals seem to have similar shapes and I also noticed that I had spotted this in my past animal study.
In his study below he shows how legs on these animals work in similar ways; "scapula to shoulder into elbow to the wrist and rest of the feet."
He mentions how seeing these animals live and drawing them from a live reference, you often see these anatomies/bones in motion and working.
Tonight I plan to do some studies on big cats especially before my trip to Fota because I know I always enjoy watching those move around in any zoo. I might also see if I can work on looking at kangaroo anatomies and comparing those to the anatomy of a wallaby. Im curious if theres much of a difference as I have seen them roaming around fota.
In the next part of this video we see Aaron out at a farm and we see his drawing process of drawing a donkey but he talks us through his thought process no matter the animal.
He talks about how important it is to not start drawing immediately and to just observe the animal for a while, studying their form and how they move. He mentions how basic anatomy knowledge is very helpful for when the animal moves and you have started drawing an animal in a specific pose.
He tells us that observing is better than getting an amazing drawer as its important to get information. I feel like this will be something I will struggle to do as I often am a perfectionist when I can be so tomorrow I plan to try keeping to quick observational drawings rather than focusing on a perfect drawing. I might try to sketch mostly in pen as this has helped me keep a more observational study sketch going instead of constantly erasing and redrawing a particular part.
He talks about how handy it is to have animals that move around for study sketches and that being at a farm is interesting because you get to see a couple different animals come and go.
In one part of the video he completely leaves the sketch as the donkey gets close again and instead starts a detail sketch of the donkeys eye as this isnt something he gets to observe in detail all the time.
These are his finished donkey sketches before he moved onto drawing goats.
He talks about his supplies to help prevent any back pains and allow him to sketch for longer, such as a chair and the board for the sketchbook.
He again reinforces studying animal anatomies before going to draw them when you know what you will draw. This to me shows that he thinks this is a very important tip that has helped him draw and study animals. "its not about getting great drawings, its about gathering information" is something he also kept repeating.
Stuart Sumida is an anatomy consultant and a professor of biology / a paleontologist. This talk was conducted through an online call, this talk was titled "why being a generalist is not a bad thing". He talks about how as a paleontologist he teaches human anatomy to doctors and animal anatomy to vets and so on. His talk is inspired by a book called "range: why generalists triumph in a specialized world" where he talks about how scientists have known this for a while.
I feel like this also stands for artists in a sense of needing to know how to draw a lot of different subjects and themes. This is confirmed by him telling students that they often hear that you often have to work your way up the ladder in the industry and you have to start anywhere you can and then work towards the position you want.
Below you can see 5 rules Stuart Sumida likes to follow in the industry.
He talks about how they broke down the animals in lion king into smaller groups to teach the staff in a more generalized way rather than focusing on each specific animal.
He talks about how animals differ based on what they eat / whether they are carnivores, herbivores or omnivores as seen in this example of a horse (herbivore) vs a cheetah (carnivore) running/galloping.
He talks about how skeletons and muscles are very important for drawing animals and followed it with these sketches of realistic dogs and a cartoon one.
A handy website he shares is DigiMorph.org which has 3d animal skulls and skeletons.
watching these videos helped me feel more prepared for tomorrows trip to Fota and it made me realize there is so much that I have yet to learn about drawing animals. I plan to use some of the mentioned techniques tomorrow if possible while drawing live animals.
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