Natural History Illustration 101: Drawing Animals

I recently completed a fantastic course, Drawing Nature, Science and Culture: Natural History 101. It’s an online course run by the University of Newcastle in Australia on the edX platform and is aimed at artists who want to improve their observational skills in order to draw realistic animals and plants.  The course is free, but you can pay a small fee to get a certificate if you achieve a mark of 50% or above. You are awarded marks by taking part in two multiple choice exams, peer assessment of your drawings and participation in the discussion forums.  The course runs for 6 weeks and covers the following topics:

Week 1: About the course

Week 2: Observational Drawing

Week 3: Field Work

Week 4: Understanding Structure – Botanical

Week 5: Understanding Structure – Animals

Week 6: Rendering

Composition

I found this course really useful in explaining some of the fundamentals, like composition. I had a general understanding about what composition was, but this was the first place I found a clear break down of the components. It really made me think more about my drawings.

Drawing Construction

My favourite module was understanding the structure of animals. Not only was the anatomy of different animals fascinating, but I learned an incredibly useful skill: drawing animals using basic shapes. The technical term for this is drawing construction. The task for that week was to draw a mammal and a bird using basic shapes. I decided to draw a North American river otter and a Toco toucan.

How to use Shapes to Draw Animals

Using basic shapes to draw a mammal you can start very simply by drawing a circle for the head, a circle for the rib cage and an oblong for the pelvis. You connect them together to form a neck and body to give a starting structure that you can then start refining by adding muscles.

The legs and arms start as basic cylinders with cone shapes for paws. Having the pelvis bone represented makes it easy to add the tail as an extension of the spine from the pelvis. Drawing lines to indicate the 3-D nature of the form can help with the placement of eyes, nose and ears.

Adding a few fur details can really bring the structure to life but the objective is just to get the shape and proportions of the outline, not to add all of the fur or feathers, that comes later in the rendering stage.   

How to use Shapes to draw Birds

Drawing the structure of a bird is a bit different.  You start with a circle for the head, a circle for the body, and an oblong for the beak. No pelvis this time.

Using lines to indicate the 3-D form of the head can help with the correct placement of the beak which actually connects to the skull under the eye. The legs are initially drawn as simple lines, like you would give a stick figure.

The tail starts as a fan shape which you can add some indication of the different feather shapes. From these general shapes you can then refine the shape of the breast and add the wing shapes. Adding an indication of feathers and distinguishing marks adds a bit of character.

Drawing a Hare

For the final assessment I used there techniques to draw a hare. You can read all about it in my blog post ‘Natural History Illustration 101: Drawing a Hare‘.