Drawing Animals

By Hugh Laidman

A valuable guide by a well-known teacher and artist, this volume abounds in expert advice on methods and techniques for drawing animals, offering 26 lessons with step-by-step drawings of wild and domestic creatures. Author Hugh Laidman directed the U.S. Marine Corps art program, was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art to do work for NASA, and was a successful syndicated cartoonist. In Drawing Animals, his breadth of skill and experience has been successfully distilled into a concise, easy-to-follow and beautifully illustrated guide.
Laidman offers knowledgeable advice on methods and techniques before proceeding to the heart of the book: expertly rendered instructional drawings of more than two dozen animals, from cats and dogs to elephants and gorillas. The emphasis throughout the text is on understanding animal anatomy and behavior as a guide to creating natural, expressive drawings, while developing an individual style and approach. Artists at all levels, beginner to expert, will find this book a source of inspiration as well as instruction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Mar 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486138480

Book preview

Copyright

Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Hugh Laidman Copyright © renewed 2003 by Elizabeth Hill

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2003, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by E. P Dutton, New York, in 1979.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laidman, Hugh.

Drawing animals / Hugh Laidman.—Dover ed.

p.cm.

Originally published: New York: E. P Dutton, 1979.

9780486138480

1. Animals in art. 2. Drawing—Technique. I. Title.

NC780.L27 2003

743.6—dc21

2003053287

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Acknowledgment

This book began in South Africa with the help of Rocco Knobel, Director of National Parks, and under the guidance of Bernard Sargent, South Africa’s superb animal artist.

Thanks go to the personnel and animals of the Bronx Zoo, the Cleveland Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, Busch Gardens, African Safari, and the Buffalo Museum of Science. Most of all, thanks to the animals, domestic and wild.

for Jennifer

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgment

Dedication

Introduction

A Word about Photography

Birds

Cats

Canines

Horses

Farm Animals

Pigs

Llama

Camels

Giraffes

Elephants

Hippos

Rhinos

Tapir

Deer and Antelope

Kangaroos

Anteaters

Pandas

Raccoons

Primates

On-the-spot felt pen sketches at the Genessee Valley Hunt.

Introduction

There is no singularly right or wrong way to draw animals. Three great American artists, Edward Hicks, John James Audubon, and Frederick Remington, differed widely in their approaches, yet all three left us memorable paintings of animals.

Hicks’s paintings were essentially copied, in whole or in part, from paintings and engravings of the day. Audubon moved a step closer to the real thing. Not content with observing animals in their wild state, he shot them, hung them on wires—sometimes in positions that would have been impossible for the animal while alive—and painted them magnificently.

Remington went still further. He believed that only through close observation of the living animal could an artist make a creditable painting of it. He spent much of his time living with the cowboys and the military in the American West, drawing hundreds of on-the-spot sketches of the animals. These, in turn, became the foundation of his great works.

This book suggests that you avoid the swipe method employed by Hicks, and the shoot-‘em-string-’em-up procedure of Audubon, and follow more closely the on-the-spot observation practices of Remington. Hicks’s copying system generally leads to disaster for the would-be artist while Audubon’s method is impractical in today’s society. Remington’s approach to the drawing of animals is not only practical but singularly effective and enjoyable.

Readily available to the artist who would draw animals are hundreds of reproductions of great paintings of today and yesterday. These should be studied by the aspiring animal artist. Stuffed animals are also excellent objects for study, as are statues of animals. Seeing how someone else handled the problem of depicting a particular animal helps to develop your own approach to technique and materials. You will want, too, to study photographs of animals, both those you yourself have taken and those taken by professional animal photographers.

These methods of study combined with hundreds of on-the-spot sketches lead to good animal drawing. But knowledge and study are, in themselves, not enough. The artist does not just draw a cat or a dog or a chimpanzee. He must draw with a feeling for the animal. This he develops through long hours of observation of its habits, its movements, and its personality. As the artist watches the animal in motion and at rest, he makes notes and sketches his observations. The more he learns about the animal, the better able he is to draw it.

A knowledge of animal anatomy can be most helpful, but such knowledge is best if it is absorbed gradually. An overemphasis on anatomy in the early stages of learning to draw animals can be frustrating and discouraging. Once you are sketching with relative proficiency, it is time enough to look more deeply into what goes on underneath the surface.

If you

Reviews for Drawing Animals

[Jaroot Nuanma · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love it ? so awesome, fantastic artist , beautiful & look very like nature