One of our illustrating Children’s books students, Lucy, tackled the walking the dog exercise so well, I asked if she could explain how she came up with her designs for our blog. As you can see below, her preparation drawings and final piece is excellent. I hope you find it inspiring!
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For the walking animal exercise I decided that it would help to draw an animal that I was not confident at drawing and one of those animals is a dog. I also thought that dogs are popular in children’s books so would be the most handy to have practised. As I don’t have a dog of my own I also didn’t have a very good understanding of how they walked and acted so was good to look into this.
I chose to draw a Cocker Spaniel dog just because I like them =D I did try to draw a Westie but found them too difficult to not make it look like an old dog who looks like he has a moustache. To start off I gathered pictures from the internet to draw from and drew some quick sketches on the computer. This helped me understand their body shape.
I then did some research on how they moved including going to the beach and doing a little bit of dog watching =D This helped to understand which leg moved at what time or with which leg, this was sometimes tricky to spot! I looked at how they walk as well as how they run and then drew some quick sketches from what I had seen.
From drawing all of these images I started to see a personality appear. The final colour image I wanted to be a little comical as he is quite cartoony in style, so had him in a creeping, balancing pose on the wall following the bird.
Love the way the dog’s expressions and movements are captured. If I ran a ‘Daily’ this dog would have his own cartoon strip.
Great piece of work.
Its great isn’t it, superb piece of observational drawing.