Drawing Animals

A previously featured artist in Artist’s Palette magazine has prepared this tutorial article to share his drawing techniques for the benefit of our readers.

- John Cornwell

During my 38 years as a professional artist, I have become well known for painting animals – more by accident than design; in particular horses, cattle and dogs.

Strangely enough, one of my best-known works is the bronze sculpture of Matthew Flinders’ cat ‘Trim’, who resides on the window ledge of the New South Wales State Library in Macquarie Street, Sydney.

When I was a student at the National Art School, a very enlightened teacher was sufficiently interested in my efforts to point out the similarities in the anatomy of very many animals – which all evolved from basically the same structure.

Every such animal has a head, a neck, rib cage, shoulder blades, forearm, elbow, lower arm and a great variety of forms of structure representing the human wrist and hands. Strangely enough, a lot (even with hooves) still have a similar bone structure. All these animals also have backbones, hips, buttocks and thighs.

To make convincing drawings, it is essential to understand how your subject is constructed – no matter if it is a house or a horse.

Just to make life more interesting, see if you can count the number of breeds of horses. All are instantly recognizable as being equine, but you have to decide which of their features are different.

It does not matter whether the animal is large or small; the head shape of all breeds is fundamentally the same. A thoroughbred has a straight nose; whereas the beautiful, graceful Arab has a distinctive inward kink to its nose. It is an altogether more delicate animal with slender cannon bones and hooves. This does not mean that one animal is more beautiful than the other; just that they are different.