Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Animal Studies

As I already mentioned, my drawing time is pretty limited at the moment. But, I always take my sketchbook to work with me and draw during my breaks.

Although I try to work from life whenever I can, the nice thing about working in a bookstore is the selection of resources that I have to work from. I like to grab one of the field guides from the Pets and Nature section and head off to the back room (the next best thing to drawing at a zoo). My goal is to get familiar with the characteristics of different animals by drawing them realistically. That way, I will have the drawings to refer back to, OR some of those characteristics might materialize in one of my future doodles.


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Sometimes I’ll work from some of the DK baby books that contain real photographs of babies and toddlers showing different positions and expressions. For older kids, I’ll just recruit one of my own kids to pose if I’m stumped on how a limb should be positioned.

Here, I’ve shown 2 of my sketchbook pages with some of the animal sketches. I especially like how the badger, the groundhog, and the wolverine turned out.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Boy, I certainly understand the dilemma of limited time. I only have my two-year-old (for now), but that somehow consumes an awful lot of those precious spare moments when I could be putting pencil to paper.

In order to get any writing done, I have to wake up at 6am and drive into my "day job" an hour early. It's tough, but when it's something you love you'll find a way and make the time, I think. As for drawing? Well, I still don't get to do as much as I want. Sigh...

But keep it up! (I like the clock doodle, too; I'm a sucker for whimsical stuff =)