Animal Drawing Tutorials

Get into drawing animals with our resident animal drawing expert. With the assistance of diagrams on each animals anatomy, from skeleton to muscle structure and even the odd animation, you'll learn how easy it is to draw your favourite animals. Keep checking back to see the latest in this on going series of how to draw animals.

Drawing animals can be a daunting feat if you've never tried before, or have never made any serious attempts, but it can be fairly easy once you break down the generalized appearance. Most animals you will attempt to draw are all composed of the same basic anatomy structures - skeleton, muscle, and skin, and will all share the same basic placement of limbs, tails, and obviously heads (I would hope).

Learning how to draw is a step by step process. You can accurately say it's more of a journey. However what you need to realize is a journey has a starting point, a beginning, and everyone has to start from the beginning.

Each animal drawing that you will learn to draw will be created from simple basic shapes. However, I will show you how to draw these animals from sketching to vector versions. When possible, additional tips on how to make your sketches better. My goal is to make sure that you can draw the cartoon character every steps of the way.

The first step of every tutorial is sketching. It might seem like a simple one, but creating a good and effective sketch requires some good drawing skills. It's easy to come up with useless lines or unusable shapes. Fortunately, since all cartoon characters are simple and well-designed, you should be able to reproduce these illustrations quite easily.

Once the sketches are done, it's time to create a clean and professional version of your character. Using the application is always a good idea. Most applications are easy to use and very effective. You can create several basic effects quite easily. Chances are that you will even create cartoon animals using new techniques that you thought were impossible or too difficult.

Creating a simple 2D character can be done by anyone, but adding realistic effects like shadows can be a little bit more challenging. In this section, I will give you all the tips you need to create stunning shadows and reflections that will enhance your illustration. My goal is to show you that it is not as tough as it might seem to come up with something nice and visually appealing in a few minutes only. You just need to know how to use the right tools. Like you can see on the image above, I will also display a few basic tips to help you understand how to achieve certain effects like slicing shapes or creating transparency.

Since most application are different and that I don't want to use a specific application in my examples, you might need to read the help file of your software to select the proper tools. Like I said earlier, this section is not for everyone. You need a few basic skills to duplicate the sketches and owning an application is a must. I hope you will have fun creating these cartoon animals and don't forget that your animal drawing will be as good as you want it to be. Have fun and I hope you will enjoy these drawing lessons.

Drawing is like a muscle. The more you work at it, the stronger it becomes. As mentioned above, it helps me personally when I draw fast through means of speed sketching, but there are many other things one can do.