Learn to Paint and Draw Animals
I decided to write some articles about how to paint and draw pets in various mediums. I’m asked many times from other artists or people that want to learn how to draw or paint better, “how do you create so wonderful and lifelike portraits”, so I decided to write it down right here along with pictures. In this section of my web page you will be able to learn my techniques and why I use them.
There are several important base steps in the process of creating lifelike portraits, they are:
- Don’t start right away with painting or drawing animals if you are a beginner. Draw subjects from reality such as mugs, apples, tables or your own hand and learn how to find right angles with help of that.
- If you aren’t sure about how to find angles, don’t start with adding colours until you are, especially if you are a beginner with colouring too.
- To paint or draw pets you have to be an animal lover from the bottom of your hart. That is important because of being able to “paint the personality and character” of the animal you are painting.
- Be prepared to learn techniques from the old masters and stop loving the modern art, buy books about how they painted! Today they usually never teach the new artists how to paint lifelike artwork; I had to learn these techniques by my self even though I went to Art school.
If I go from my own aspects I have to say that this learning period can be very hard and long, some never get where I am today, no matter how hard they try and even I am learning something new every time I paint or draw! I’m learning from my old mistakes and I always look at my work with big criticism. Every portrait you will create will be better then the former one and don’t give up trying. Take a look at how the paintings of the Old masters look like, Rembrandt, titian, Vermeer and others. I use a bit of their technique to paint my own paintings with. There can be bought several books about their way of painting.
Before you start to Paint a pet find out about the character and personality. If you just have a photo and you don’t know anything about the pet, you can find about the personality form his eyes. The eyes are images of the soul and can tell you quite a lot about personalities. Before I paint for a commission I always ask my clients to write something about their pets. A little about personality can help me out allot, but even though I never get any descriptions I have no problem with “painting their personalities”. The reason I write about this is because it’s very important to know. If the pet has fur over the eyes its way harder to paint the personality!
So now we have a photograph to use and we know a little about the animal too. The photograph has to be high quality and that means you have to see details otherwise you can’t create a very detailed pet portrait. If you however want to create a more impressionistic portrait you don’t need all the details in a photograph, but this article is about how to paint realistic and detailed pet portraits. |
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