Sketchbook 2013 - animals001

I've been wanting to get back into drawing DRAGONS and other creatures for ages now, but I keep putting it off because I know that I DON'T know what I'm doing... I've got to the point with humans where I have at least a fundamental understanding of their anatomy, proportions, how to pose them, etc, so trying to do animals, where I don't have any of that knowledge, is really off-putting.

Anyway, I suppose a good start is to draw real animals from references many times, before I have any hope of drawing decent creatures from my imagination.

There's this extremely useful website/tool that I found many moons ago, here: [link]
It's great for practising! It shows you photos for a certain time limit before moving onto the next one, which means that you're constantly drawing against the clock... I suppose it's a good thing because it discourages procrastination and encourages quick analysis and a lot of variety (you can get through loads of animals quickly rather than spending a whole night on just one, and you're given animals you might not otherwise draw; I'd never normally draw a fish, especially not from that angle), BUT it's also sort of frustrating because it means that you can't really focus on making things *look good*...

Most of the things here are 30-second gesture drawings, which I included because I know I find it interesting when other people show off their gesture drawings. The coloured ones took about five minutes each, though perhaps next time I should focus more on doing line drawings than paintings, as I feel that I don't fully understand a lot of the contours and details.

Maybe I can do these regularly! But I bet I don't!!!