Drawing Animals
By Hugh Laidman
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About this ebook
Laidman offers knowledgeable advice on methods and techniques before proceeding to the heart of the book: expertly rendered instructional drawings of more than two dozen animals, from cats and dogs to elephants and gorillas. The emphasis throughout the text is on understanding animal anatomy and behavior as a guide to creating natural, expressive drawings, while developing an individual style and approach. Artists at all levels, beginner to expert, will find this book a source of inspiration as well as instruction.
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5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love it ? so awesome, fantastic artist , beautiful & look very like nature
Book preview
Drawing Animals - Hugh Laidman
Copyright
Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Hugh Laidman Copyright © renewed 2003 by Elizabeth Hill
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2003, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by E. P Dutton, New York, in 1979.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laidman, Hugh.
Drawing animals / Hugh Laidman.—Dover ed.
p.cm.
Originally published: New York: E. P Dutton, 1979.
9780486138480
1. Animals in art. 2. Drawing—Technique. I. Title.
NC780.L27 2003
743.6—dc21
2003053287
Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501
Acknowledgment
This book began in South Africa with the help of Rocco Knobel, Director of National Parks, and under the guidance of Bernard Sargent, South Africa’s superb animal artist.
Thanks go to the personnel and animals of the Bronx Zoo, the Cleveland Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, Busch Gardens, African Safari, and the Buffalo Museum of Science. Most of all, thanks to the animals, domestic and wild.
for Jennifer
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgment
Dedication
Introduction
A Word about Photography
Birds
Cats
Canines
Horses
Farm Animals
Pigs
Llama
Camels
Giraffes
Elephants
Hippos
Rhinos
Tapir
Deer and Antelope
Kangaroos
Anteaters
Pandas
Raccoons
Primates
On-the-spot felt pen sketches at the Genessee Valley Hunt.
Introduction
There is no singularly right
or wrong
way to draw animals. Three great American artists, Edward Hicks, John James Audubon, and Frederick Remington, differed widely in their approaches, yet all three left us memorable paintings of animals.
Hicks’s paintings were essentially copied, in whole or in part, from paintings and engravings of the day. Audubon moved a step closer to the real thing. Not content with observing animals in their wild state, he shot them, hung them on wires—sometimes in positions that would have been impossible for the animal while alive—and painted them magnificently.
Remington went still further. He believed that only through close observation of the living animal could an artist make a creditable painting of it. He spent much of his time living with the cowboys and the military in the American West, drawing hundreds of on-the-spot sketches of the animals. These, in turn, became the foundation of his great works.
This book suggests that you avoid the swipe
method employed by Hicks, and the shoot-‘em-string-’em-up
procedure of Audubon, and follow more closely the on-the-spot observation practices of Remington. Hicks’s copying system generally leads to disaster for the would-be artist while Audubon’s method is impractical in today’s society. Remington’s approach to the drawing of animals is not only practical but singularly effective and enjoyable.
Readily available to the artist who would draw animals are hundreds of reproductions of great paintings of today and yesterday. These should be studied by the aspiring animal artist. Stuffed animals are also excellent objects for study, as are statues of animals. Seeing how someone else handled the problem of depicting a particular animal helps to develop your own approach to technique and materials. You will want, too, to study photographs of animals, both those you yourself have taken and those taken by professional animal photographers.
These methods of study combined with hundreds of on-the-spot sketches lead to good animal drawing. But knowledge and study are, in themselves, not enough. The artist does not just draw a cat or a dog or a chimpanzee. He must draw with a feeling for the animal. This he develops through long hours of observation of its habits, its movements, and its personality. As the artist watches the animal in motion and at rest, he makes notes and sketches his observations. The more he learns about the animal, the better able he is to draw it.
A knowledge of animal anatomy can be most helpful, but such knowledge is best if it is absorbed gradually. An overemphasis on anatomy in the early stages of learning to draw animals can be frustrating and discouraging. Once you are sketching with relative proficiency, it is time enough to look more deeply into what goes on underneath the surface.
If you