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animal
drawing |
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For the last five years, I have taught animal drawing at
the Los Angeles/Griffith Park Zoo. These classes are offered by Associates
in Art, a private art school in Sherman Oaks, that specializes in a wide variety
of traditional drawing, painting, illustration and animation classes. (www.associatesinart.com) |
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The
first class meeting begins at the school with a lecture and demonstration on
comparative anatomy, and also covers some of the basic skills of quick sketch
as they pertain to drawing animals. All of the remaining classes, save one,
are held at the zoo and all drawing is done from life. Animal drawing requires
a different set of drawing skills than traditional studio drawing classes. The
students are particularly warned to avoid the copying of photographs or freeze-framing
video for this study. |
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| The
next class begins at the zoo with chimpanzees, as their form and proportion
is closest to ours, 97% genetically the same. We spend the next two classes
studying a variety of other primates with greater variety in their proportions. |
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| The
fifth class is held at either the Natural History Museum, next to USC, or the
Page Museum on Wilshire Blvd. There we make a detailed study of quadrapedal
(four legged) skeletal structure, landmarks and comparisons of articulation
and specialization that all lead to clarity of understanding, and drawing! We
also study the skeletons of birds and sometimes take those observations into
the hall of dinosaur skeletons and speculate widely on how they moved and acted
based on current animal forms! |
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The
first and fundamental rule of drawing animals is one must get the gesture -
or life of the pose - of the animal in the first five to fifteen lines on the
page. If those lines do not feel like the animal and already possess something
of its character, one should move on to the next series of observations. Eventually,
the student must understand something of the skeleton and musculature to make
the drawing come alive and to feel like the animal could stand up and walk off
the page! |
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If
an art student loves figure drawing, animal drawing is a wonderful extension
of that study. The study and drawing of animals actually makes one's figure
drawing stronger. The exaggerated forms of animal anatomy help explain many
aspects of human anatomy that can be rather subtle. |
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return
to top |
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