A spot of art nerdery for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
When was learning to draw animals, I worked very hard on that method that involves dividing everything into sort of blobs. It's a pretty decent method, especially when you're first learning the anatomy of a particular animal. I recommend it.
But it has limitations. In particular, the finished drawing can look very stiff and sort of detached from the ground, as if it isn't really carrying its own weight.
These days, once I've got the basic structure of the animal down, I switch to a much more freeform method where I look at the curves that define the overall shape.
The reason for this is twofold: first of all, because when you see a shape from the distance, these curves are all you can really make out, so they become a kind of visual shorthand for that animal. If you can reproduce those curves in a drawing, it will be more viscerally recognisable. It won't just "look like" a cow or a horse or a dog, it will BE that thing.
Secondly, because those curves are how the animal's body carries its weight and transfers it to the ground. Your leg is made up of a thigh, a shin, an ankle and a foot, but it doesn't act like that. It acts like a single, elegant, flexible pillar, like a moveable tree trunk. If you focus on the joints, you'll miss that. It's hard to explain, but look at the examples and try to see what I mean. In the first, you see the shapes, but no weight. It's sort of hovering. In the second, you can see the weight flowing smoothly through the body and down to the ground.
The first example does look more realistic at this stage. The second looks oversimplified. It IS oversimplified - I haven't defined the joints and muscles at all (except for the point of the elbow). But those can be indicated later. For now I'm getting the overall shape.
Now the difference looks kind of subtle, with a few more details added to indicate joints and musculature. But I hope you can begin to see the effect of the two methods on the final animal.
Something I want to be clear on is these are not a "wrong" and "right" method. They are two ends of a spectrum. And different types of animals will fall at different points. I'm not a biologist or zoologist, so I don't know why, but the more you lean into this method, the more mammal-like your creature will look. Mammals have a very smooth, put-together stance. To make something look reptilian, you might need to lean more towards the first method. But I still recommend sketching these through-lines or outline curves to avoid your drawing looking weightless or stiff.
Hope this helped someone! I'm not an art expert, just passing on some of the ways I go about things.
The reference I used here is a wonderful 3D model by monoganog on Sketchfab
