Draw Dogs (or Anything) With or Without Reference | Steve Worthington | Skillshare
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Draw Dogs (or Anything) With or Without Reference

teacher avatar Steve Worthington, Storyboard artist/illustrator/sculptor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Course Trailer

      1:52

    • 2.

      Class Requirements

      3:15

    • 3.

      Class Project

      5:07

    • 4.

      Basics of Structural Drawing

      16:18

    • 5.

      Construct a Very Basic Dog

      6:30

    • 6.

      Construct a Fairly Basic Dog

      16:09

    • 7.

      Folding, Bending and Twisting

      11:30

    • 8.

      Modified Boxes

      10:53

    • 9.

      Mannequin Shapes

      8:30

    • 10.

      Constructing Two Dogs Playing

      13:12

    • 11.

      Unboxing the Skeleton

      13:16

    • 12.

      Introducing Anatomy

      4:41

    • 13.

      Skeleton and Surface Form

      8:41

    • 14.

      Rotating Skeleton from Different Perspectives

      1:15

    • 15.

      Pose Analysis - Scratching

      10:22

    • 16.

      Pose Analysis - Leg Lifting

      5:19

    • 17.

      Contour Lines

      3:28

    • 18.

      Boxes vs Round Shapes

      6:02

    • 19.

      Extreme Perspective

      4:11

    • 20.

      Use Reference, Don't Be Its Slave

      13:07

    • 21.

      Expressions and Facial Muscles

      15:51

    • 22.

      Learning Complex Forms

      11:54

    • 23.

      Drawing Different Breeds

      16:40

    • 24.

      Locomotion - Walks

      5:15

    • 25.

      Locomotion - Trotting

      6:23

    • 26.

      Locomotion - Canter and Gallop

      6:15

    • 27.

      Locomotion - Loose Doodles

      2:29

    • 28.

      Some Things to Look Out For

      9:07

    • 29.

      Fit It All In with Camera Height and Tilt

      8:59

    • 30.

      Some Visual Aids

      4:44

    • 31.

      Life Drawing from Memory

      3:10

    • 32.

      Well Done, and Thanks!

      0:35

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About This Class

A structural approach to drawing generally, and drawing dogs in particular. Once learned and mastered, you will be able to draw dogs doing anything, from any viewpoint, whether or not you have visual reference of the angle you need. 

This course is for students who are already comfortable drawing, and also serious about upping their drawing skills to a more professional level. 

This course is not limited to drawing dogs. You can apply the structural approach to drawing anything at all. Dogs are, however, the example subject in this course. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Steve Worthington

Storyboard artist/illustrator/sculptor

Teacher

Hi there, I'm a professional storyboard artist, illustrator and sculptor. I spent 8 years in Los Angeles drawing shooting boards at hundreds of production companies (or hotel lobbies, people's kitchen tables, sound stages, on location in catering tents, you name it!).

Before that I worked in-house at a couple of ad agencies. One in London (UK), and one in Hong Kong. 

Now I work remotely from home (mostly) in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA). I still go in and sit with directors to thumbnail scenes for some tv shows and movies that are being made in NM, which I then finish up at home.

Drawing shooting boards for commercial, film and tv directors has been my bread and butter for most of the time.

I also enjoy sculpting animals (I'm Critterville on Etsy... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Course Trailer: Hi, I'm Steve Worthington, storyboard artist, illustrator and sculptor. I've made my living with a pencil in London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. Thanks to the constructive approach to drawing, which you'll be learning and in this class, we're going to be drawing dogs with and without reference. I'll teach you to break down and then recreate the structure of a dog, so you can draw one from your memory. You'll even be able to draw dogs that you've seen, but from completely different angles. Whether you've been illustrating for years or you just picked up a pencil yesterday, you need a sound structural approach in order to just make things up. Without that structural approach and being comfortable using perspective, you're missing out on the freedom to invent and confidently draw whatever you want. In this class, you're going to learn how to construct and rough in a basic dog in perspective and you look forward to making mistakes so that you can learn from those mistakes. Get ready to make some pretty bad drawings at first, so that you can use them as stepping stones to make some solid and convincing, pretty major improvements. I've even included a rotating plastic dog skeleton which you can study whenever you like. For the class project, we'll be finding some top photos and then drawing them from completely different angles. Along the way, I'll be mentioning some tips and tricks and also some pitfalls to avoid. All of this stuff I've learned from over two decades of storyboarding in the trenches. By the end of this course, you'll have the tools to move forward drawing not just dogs, but anything, doing whatever you want. Thanks to this structural approach. I'll see you in class. 2. Class Requirements: There are a few things that you will need for this course. The first one and the most important one is to embrace the idea of making mistakes. They really are your friend. They're brutally honest, but they show you exactly where the holes in your knowledge are that you need to fill. I like to think of this constructive approach to drawing as it's like hopping in a car, that's going to take you on a journey to improve your drawings dramatically over time. But the car won't move until you actually start making mistakes. Mistakes are the fuel that drives the car. You're going to make some really bad drawings at first and those bad drawings, you need to look at them, analyze them, figure out what's the biggest, most egregious mistake that you need to fix first, work on that, and then just keep moving slowly bit by bit and you'll make progress and you'll be off on your way onto a journey of continual improvement. You're going to need a drawing tool. I personally like to use a pencil. I also draw digitally so you can do that too. The important thing for me anyway, and it might also be the case for you is to not get a fancy sketchbook. Just draw on whatever paper you can find. I use paper that's been used for something else first a lot of the time it's got writing on the back of it. That way, I can just focus on trying to figure out what I know and don't know, and that way you're not precious about your drawing. As soon as I open a nicely bound sketchbook I start going [inaudible]. buy a ream of photocopy paper, get lots of paper, and whatever you're most comfortable drawing with. Another thing that's really important, you're going to need is patience. You're going to need a lot of patience because this is a new way of thinking and is incremental, is one step at a time. Don't rush it. You just want to let things sink in and take root before you move on too quickly. Just be patient, let it move on one step at a time incrementally and you'll be really happy with how you're doing. I guess you'll need a dog of some kind. If you have a dog, you just got a puppy and you're going to draw its progress as it grows older and you get better, that'll be great. Look at dogs on the street. Look at dogs at the dog park. Videotape the dogs. Look at dogs online. Look at photographs of dogs. Look at lots of dogs. Thank you for taking this course. I'm really glad you did. This way of thinking, this constructive drawing approach is something that I have been doing since my early 20s when I just decided enough of making pretty drawings, I just want to get better. As a result, it allowed me to go from working, not just in London, but also I moved to Hong Kong for a few years and then I moved to Los Angeles. It's taken me around the world, got my drawing a whole lot better. Hopefully, it will do similar things for you. Let's get stuck in. 3. Class Project: For the class project, we're going to find some photographs of dogs. I'd suggest muscular, short-head dogs because you can see the forms clearly. The first step would be to draw that dog. I would start with very simple poses. Gather a range of poses that you can challenge yourself with but start simple. Then the next thing you'll do is draw that same dog but from a different angle, so maybe 90 degrees around, or from higher or a three-quarter view. The important thing when you're drawing that first one is to not just get distracted with details that you're not that familiar with anyway. The idea being to learn the structure and form of the dog, draw that, and then recreate that from a different angle by reconstructing the dog. Focus on the proportions, and the forms, and the volumes of the dog over little incidental shadow details and stuff like that. In each of these examples, the top-left dog, the first one drawn, is the one from reference. The other two are where you have repositioned yourself mentally in order to redraw it from a different angle. This one, a little trickier than the first one. It's up in the air, so it's not touching the ground and there's a little bit of twist. Where it gets tricky though is when you bring yourself around 90 degrees, then you have to figure out which direction all the parts are facing. That's the key thing. The most important thing is establishing the block that encloses the rib cage, the block that encloses the pelvis, and being really aware of where the front side and backside, and left and right sides of those are relative to each other, so you can then redraw them. This was the trickiest one because of the extreme twist. Getting that pelvic block relative to the chest block was quite challenging, once you started looking at it from a different point of view or imagining it from a different point of view and then reconstructing it from that different point of view. I had a crack at it and then decided I was going to start it over from a little bit more further around. The back feet were giving me a bit of grief, especially with this third attempt where you're looking at it from directly above. In the end I thought, well, the best way to figure out the back feet is to imagine a plank attached to them, like a skateboard or something. That way, it just made it a lot easier to figure out which one was the highest that you're seeing the bottoms of the feet from above. I just drew in what I'd been thinking just as an illustration there of little ways that you can use to try and stay on top of being aware of which way things are facing. Because that definitely is the most important thing. This is a really unbelievably useful way of drawing when you have to, well, my background is drawing storyboards. For example, recently I had to draw a scene in a movie where a stagecoach got hijacked. Instead of drawing a whole load of horses, I just figured out what size and shape block the horses would fit in. Just one square for the horses, one cube and another one for the stagecoach. Then I could just work out loads of shots, just drawing a couple of blocks in different proportions. Then you just throw in a few other blocks that represent people on horses and people on the ground and stuff. Then once you've established all your compositions, you then fill in what's inside the blocks. Once you have those proportions figured out, you can then look at them from different angles, and construct things so much quicker and more easily than trying to draw a person, and then another person, and then a horse, and then a horse behind the horse. This method of drawing is just unbelievably useful with regard to that kind of thing. Highly recommend it. It's difficult though, it really is once you start getting into multiple figures and reconstructing them from different angles. Just don't be discouraged. Stay patient, and take it one step at a time. Post your progress. Start simple, standing poses are great, and then move on to a sitting, laying, running, jumping. Just keep posting progress because other people will be keen to see how you're doing as much as I'm sure you'll be keen to see how they're doing. Catalog your progress and have fun. 4. Basics of Structural Drawing: To do a constructive approach to drawing things, you need to be comfortable with a certain number of things with regard to drawing 3D objects in perspective. I will show you what I mean. Here, we have a horizon line, which would be where your eyeline is. We put a vanishing point here. You need to be comfortable drawing. Now, I'm just going to start out by drawing boxes that are facing us. This surface here is facing us. Just keeps it simple. We are driving these lines towards our vanishing point so we could have a giant floating pizza box in the sky kind of thing. The next thing you need to be comfortable doing is leaning boxes against each other so you need to be able to rotate them in space. For example, let's say we have a box that's leaning on this one. As you can see, it's quite a long box. Just get rid of that little line there. This vanishing point will help us figure out these lines here. Yeah, it's leaning back. We can do, say another box over here. This is leaning up at a steeper angle. Again, we're using this vanishing point to help us with these lines. You need to be comfortable figuring out where the corners of these boxes meet the ground plane. You must relate these various points to each other and just be comfortable turning around these three-dimensional shapes. We're just going to stick with boxes for now. Cylinders and cones, and all that stuff are useful too. We can stack another box here. The bottom of it would be again, touching the ground plane. It's leaning here on this box. Again, we can use this vanishing point to help us here and we could have another box. It's a skinny box. This on top of this one coming towards this. You can see that I'm converging these lines towards the vanishing point that would represent if you tipped your head back and look directly overhead. Your vanishing point will be way off the page in that direction. I just like to do that like same deal here. You'd have another vanishing point way down there that would indicate if you just tipped your head forwards and looked straight down which tends to mean that when you're drawing boxes further out to the edge, if your vanishing point below your feet is all the way down here and the vanishing point above your head is all the way up here and you have to connect those two points with lines, I'll exaggerate it a little bit, but you're going to wind up with curved shapes here. Again, these lines are converging off to vanishing points that go way off the side of the page in each direction as well. Again, we can use that vanishing point to help us here. As you get towards the middle, this curve becomes less pronounced. When you turn a box, let's say we have a box and instead of the front just facing us, we turn it to be more an edge is facing us, then this vanishing point is not going to be helpful for this line because it's going to be further over here. Likewise with this one, go to the same vanishing point which would be over here. I need to have another vanishing point over there for these sides. Every box that you draw, just rotate it to a different degree, would have its own set of vanishing points along the eyeline. This is assuming the boxes are sitting flat on the ground plane and they're actual boxes. The next thing you have to be comfortable doing as you're constructing things using this box-like approach is punching holes in things. We'll draw a circular hole cut out of this box here. Because of that, you'd be able to see this box going through it. Another thing is that you want to be able to be comfortable doing is pushing shapes through other shapes. For example, we have another box here that's being pushed right through this box. Drawing three of forms lightly is very helpful because then you can keep the form consistent all the way through the shape, but you just don't draw it once. It's outside of the view because it's behind another part. Say we have a next box that's being punched all the way through here. Another thing that you have to feel comfortable doing is just pushing boxes into each other and intersecting them. For example, we could have another box. That is, we use this vanishing point again. This would go inside this box partly. You're comfortable mushing these shapes together because you're being aware of these corner points relative to these other corner points and their volumes. You know when they're occupying each other's space and when they're not. That's very important. Another thing is to be always aware of this eyeline here, this horizon line. It may be that you don't actually see it in your drawing. For example, let's say this is our world, but we're just drawing what's going on, say down here. This frame opening would represent, say, the sheet of paper that we have and we're drawing this stuff here. We still need to be aware that the horizon line is up here and that the vanishing point is here, so that when we draw new shapes into this scene, we can comfortably. Then you take that away, and so it's still works. The same thing goes for when you're looking up high. This would be you looking straight ahead, you tip your head back a little and look up. All of a sudden the horizon line and the vanishing point have disappeared, but you still need to know where they are so that when you draw things like up here, you know what's going on. Another useful thing to be able to do is bending, so we could draw, say, a little rectangular shape that could represent a character, perched on the edge here and so bending over and looking down and wondering why he's so far up. Twisting is another good none. We can fit a bit of twisting down here. So let's say we have a box that is like this, a thinner box and they want to twist like it's made of a flexible material. You want to twist the top around this way. We twist it 90 degrees so we can still use this vanishing point over here. So this is our new top of our box. This point was connected to this point and still is, but this point is moved, so the connection has moved obviously as well. Same thing goes with this one, and this point here would be connected to this point here, so we can draw that in as well, it's heading over there. Lastly, this point here would be connected to that. This is when you start getting into more organic looking things like bodies twisting and stuff like that. The middle section of bodies are usually more flexible than the hard end section, so this is all very useful for that. We could pile up a few more boxes here on the edge of this one, say we could put a new box here. So you have to be comfortable with this. If this is just way outside your comfort zone because you don't know too much about drawing three-dimensional objects in perspective, then definitely get up to speed on that. If you're not that comfortable, you can still follow along in this class. You just might find things get a little more difficult than you were hoping for, but at least you'll know where you need to focus your attention to catch up. Camera height is another very important thing. So let's say for example, we have a box that's just standing here and it's just facing us, same as most of the other ones, and this is a flat ground plane. We know that, say your eye level, so it might be five and half feet off the ground, for example. Then you know, if this is standing on the ground, this box could easily represent a person, so you could just draw yourself a little person in there. Let's say that you had a box that was also sitting on the ground plane, but instead of your eye level being five and half feet off the ground, let's say, and this box could maybe go over here as well. Have it L shape from above, but you can't see it above because we're exactly on the eye level. But let's say this box, your eye level is 200 feet off the ground. Well, all of a sudden you're not going to draw a 200 foot person, presumably, unless for some reason you wanted to. This would represent, say a building, and then your person would be tiny thing down here. So the eye level is very important. Another useful thing is let's say your box is standing on the ground plane and top of it is halfway to the eye level. That means that if the ground plane is consistent and doesn't like undulate up and down like a landscape. If you draw another one of these boxes that's the same size into this environment, and you draw it much closer, say over here. Let's put it on the edge over here. If you wanted it to be closer, obviously it's going to be lower down the top of it. So the bottom of it would be the same distance again, so that would be your box. We might be interfering with this one a little bit. I'm just going to shorten this up a little bit so that it's not interfering with this other box. I will just tweak our box here and adjusting things as you go, as you start to realize things are overlapping in strange ways is all part of understanding this process and then we can just erase these other lines. We can also make depressions, like say for example, you drew a rectangular. Now this could be like a tennis court that you're drawing on the ground here, but it could also be a swimming pool, so you could put like another block here. See the thing that's great about this method of drawing is that your blocks can literally represent anything. So when you're trying to draw a diving board, you can just think of it in terms of these blocks. You can even put some steps on the back of it and a swimming pool, which gets deeper as it comes towards the diving board, otherwise, you might hurt your head. We can just draw a few little random herds of boxes running around in our world, all at different angles. They do have their own sets of vanishing points. There you go, they could all be just running around. I'll quickly throw a little tone in, imagining our light source to be sort and high and off to the left. You've got to be comfortable drawing these three-dimensional shapes in space. So if you're already comfortable doing this, then by all means, just make a world of boxes like this, post it to the project. If you're not that comfortable doing this, just experiment with it. I figured all this stuff out largely by trial and error over a number of years of just being a storyboard artist who just had to solve these problems on the fly thing. Getting all this stuff figured out early on, it's definitely useful, will help you out a whole bunch. So fill up a page with some boxes in all these different positions and just get comfortable pushing them into each other, resting them against each other, stacking them on top of each other, punching holes through them, pushing them through each other, and then we can move on to the next lesson. 5. Construct a Very Basic Dog: We're going to start very simple, almost ridiculously simple. But it's always good to have something really simple to fall back on when you run into problems later on, and you'll certainly run into problems later on. I do all the time. Always it's good to just backtrack to something ridiculously simple to say that you're at least not that wrong. So what I mean is you've got a Rubik cube there, and what a Rubik cube is; well, you may have not known this, but it's three dogs standing very close together. Here's what I'm talking about. The top three of, say one end section, the top three cubes more or less correspond to the body of a dog. You can put some front legs on there just a little bit back from the front. You can put some back legs on there. You can use this again in ground plane angles, figuring out where the points go, where they're connecting with the ground. These cubes are all one head length. So the average dog, three heads lengths high, three head lengths long from the front of his chest to the points on the back of his pelvis. We're basically just looking at the top bit of a Rubik's cube. We can put ourselves a little neck in there, and then the head here. This might be the simplest-looking dog you ever saw in your life, but it's pretty difficult to mess up. What we're going to do is just draw a whole bunch of this simple shape in environments on a ground plane or maybe upon some steps or something like that so that you get comfortable just drawing this because this is a good basis from which to depart in order to then do more complicated dog. But it's always good to start simple. Take your Rubik cube, break it apart, and have them standing around. There's two, and maybe we've got one coming in this direction. Maybe you could have one just lying down. Those are your top three chunks of your Rubik cube. Dog lying down. Now we're going to draw the dogs: top third, top third, top third. Which way are they facing? Well, let's have this one facing this way, this one facing that way, and this one could be looking up here. This one could be looking at him or her. Put triangular ears on them. Keep it nice and simple. Legs, take it back a little bit from the front down to the ground. There you go. We already not getting fancy at all with these dogs. But they occupy space, they're solid, and they are about the right size. We'll get more into detail of how to make them more exactly the right size all in good time but for now, this is where we're at. If you want to put in a little shading, there we go. I can, pretty much anyone, I've made that leg a little bit too far forward so that could be the other leg over there. So there's his feet. He can have his legs like that. There's his back foot. Pretty simple. They look like square sheep, but just draw a bunch of those all over a page so they feel like they're on the ground plane in an environment and relating to each other. 6. Construct a Fairly Basic Dog: It's time to take our square sheet, which we made earlier, and make it a bit more dog-like. Here is divided into thirds, into the Rubik's cube. Three heads long, three heads down. We will do one head long neck, and then the head of the dog itself, strangely enough, is also one head in length. We're going to change, we're going to draw a line through the center of this box as well, for reasons which I will now explain. Let's go a little bit along in the back here. There we go. That top left, we're going to just push it out to the halfway point, so that's the chest box. Then the box that was in the back we're going to just shrink a little bit. That's the back box. The back feet usually, if it's thought to just standing normally, go outside of the box, and the front feet go a little bit inside the box. There's the feet. The elbows go on the halfway, up line, which is why we divided this box into halves, and so those are the knees. What we have is the forearm, which is one head in length. That's the hand, and that's the toes. Then we've got the arm, which is the front leg, of course. Further, it's divided into three parts. Scapula, which is the shoulder blade, the arm, and the forearm. The back leg is divided into three parts, which is the thigh, lower leg, and the foot, and this here is the toes. We connect to those two. This is a new improved dog. The eye, just draw them like halfway down the head. There's your nose. For now, we'll just keep the shape real simple, and draw [inaudible] the ears, one eye. This time we'll give it a tail. This is the new improved proportions. Three heads, one head, one head, one head, one head, one head, and this here is marked 3/4 of a head. Neck, one hand, and of course the head, one head. Now let's see how our new improved dog proportions work in three-dimensions. We draw ourselves the cube, Rubik's cube here, divide it in half both ways. I'll do it twice because I'm going to have that dog facing both ways. We've got that sorted out. Now we will just draw facing forwards. The point that I'm drawing there is a little rod going through to indicate where the neck would stop. Coming towards this direction, it would be foreshortened, and then the head itself would be one heads length, which would be in that world there. The front box we're taking to the halfway point, so that's here. The back one, we shortened up a little bit, and made a bit shorter in this direction too. Connect them together. Body-wise, there's a dog minus legs, we'll put the legs in in a second. That's the front view. Back view, we will show on this box up a bit. We brought this box cell to the halfway point. Connect them together. The neck, we want to put that little pin through there, and then find the halfway point, and then do a line up that's like one heads long. That seems about right. Then the head itself can go, we would draw that, hitting down that way, that before shortened. When you're drawing a three-quarter view of anything, it's easy to make it too long, at all time. Some can be mindful of making this not as long as my inclination might be. Now for some legs, the front legs, the feet usually sit inside of the ground plane bottom edge of this box. So we can put the front fee here. The back feet usually sit just outside of it, if it's just standing in a pretty boring pose. There's the back feet there. The elbows are about halfway from the floor up to the top of that box. That's why we drew this line across here. This is the forearm. This is the hand and the foot is like that. I'll draw it a little bit too far forward. There's the hand, this is the toes, and fore forearm and this is your upper arm and this is the scapula, shoulder blade if you prefer. This, this, and this are all one head, which we went over before. Then we'll put the front legs on this one here. Here's the shoulder blades going forwards to the arm and then the elbow was at the halfway point. That's about here. Drop one head down, and then there's its feet, toes, feet, forearm, upper arm, shoulder blade, neck, head. Let's not forget those triangular ears. It's looking a little bit more dog-like now. Back legs. The thigh is headlong. The lower leg is headlong, and then the foot is the third part. Then there's the toes on the end. Foot Then that would continue to there, there, and there. One head, one head, and then this chunk here is 3/4 of a head, so one, one. We put a tale on that one as well. I'll just to add a tale here while we're at it. The back feet on this one, you've got the one head coming down, one head had coming back. Less than a head going down for the foot and the toes on the bottom there. This is what our dog is looking. I'll keep it block-y looking, just so that we're staying in the world of boxes. But as you can see, it's definitely starting to look more dog-like and less like square sheep. Here I'm going to just draw over it with a different colored pencil. Give it a little bit more dogginess just to see what that might look like. What I'm doing here is just drawing more organically, but using this construction approach to keep me from going horribly wrong. This is where it's really good. You don't need to worry about your drawings looking all stiff and mechanical or anything because you're only using this as a guide. There's a lot to learn and to think about. But when you're all said and done, it's just something that you keep in the back of your mind. All black ears, and for the one facing the other way. I don't know if you ever noticed, but dogs do have very thick thighs and really narrow waists and tend to hump up. The shoulder blades. Narrow our necks on them. There's the head, elbow, forearm, wrist, toes. There we have one dog drawn twice. Shading, why not? Fur in a little bit. Little bit of a shadow on the ground, and the same goes for this side for bringing out forms and where heavy. Black ears. Again, why not? There you have it. Go ahead and draw the profile view with the thirds, and the half and the square and the smallest square, and the elbows and the feet inside and the feet outside and the head and the one head, and the one head, one head, one head, one head, one head, and tail. There you go. We'll move on to the next lesson after that. 7. Folding, Bending and Twisting: Let's take a look while we're still in the three cube world at how much flexibility is reasonable to expect. What we have for the sake of simplicity, two stiff solid boxes from the back. I'll just shade the top in, so that we can keep track of where that side is. The middle cube would be more flexible materials. I will stick that one in there. Now, what you can do is pull these two cubes apart, stretch them. It seems obvious, but sometimes when you're in the midst of drawing a thing, if you pull two things apart, that really is impossible. That is definitely a no, unless you're doing some kind of cartoon thing where anything's possible. But what these two cubes can do relative to each other really quite well is fold. Let's say, we have one there, and one there. We're bearing in mind that that spine can't pull itself apart. Here's two stiff boxes and the top surface, there and there, and a squashy material in between. Dogs can really fold to a pretty extreme degree. I mean, let's just push this a little further so bearing in mind the spine there. We can fold our dog way down like this. If a dog was actually made of two solid cubes, they wouldn't be able to occupy each other's space. But since these are just basically a guide representation for figuring out which way things are facing, we don't have to worry too much about that. There's a fixed length spine, middle bit. The top surface would be that one, that one that we can't see. There we go. Let's put some legs on these things, so we can see what we're dealing with. I should just point out that this leg here should be there. If you're anything like me, you'll make mistakes until the day you die. The next thing would be bending. You have to be careful again, when you're bending a box. Well, one box relative to another box. That, you're aware of, mindful of the length of that spine again. I know as you can see, this would have stretched itself out to double the length. You have to be super careful to bear that in mind. There we go. We've got that box bent in there, so that we can draw in it a little more solidly. Shade in the top, and draw in a flexible middle section. Then the final axis of movement for these things would be twisting. You've got your one box there. You've got your spine connecting the two. You've got your other box there. A bit twisted. Draw those in. When you're figuring out poses and analyzing poses of dogs that you find reference of say, it's really crucial to try and establish which of these, whether it's folding, bending, or twisting, is taking place. Usually, it's a combination of two or three of them. But it's usually less than you would expect of twisting, and more than you'd expect of folding. They're pretty good at folding themselves, these dogs. In terms of just a general role, this is pretty standard. Dogs can really fold themselves a long way, but they can't really extend themselves very far. You might think they can when you see a certain kind of pose. But when you actually analyze it, you'll find that it's not really the case. They seem pretty much limited to a straight line across the top. I mean, maybe a tiny little bit of extension in this direction. But really, it's all in this folding movement. For example, when you see a dog doing one of those poses where it's having a good old stretch, I mean this is possibly folded a little or straight. All the impression that you get from here is from the shoulder blades, the upper arm, forearm, and the stretches in the chest. When you're analyzing dogs and the poses they get into, actually [inaudible]. There we go. There's a dog doing the old downward facing dog. Yeah, we will move on to a more complicated set of shapes for the dog. I made a little visual aid to help demonstrate this. Let's say this is a little dog here as we can see, can't stretch it. Folding, it works. Bending it. You can probably have too much space in here in this but bear in mind the length of the spine in there, so don't bend it too far. Twisting, you can twist this way beyond most reasonable. I mean, any dog in the world can twist itself like that. I would say 45 degrees is pretty good going. Bending, I don't even know. Ninety degrees would be pushing it, maybe. But as far as folding goes, I think dogs can fold themselves beyond what I can do because of the corners of these getting in the way. A combination of might be if a dog is having a scratch, it folds its back and under, folds itself up like this and bend over a little bit, bend that way so it can get its leg in there for a bit of scratch. Yeah, I've done blue indicating the top surface. Yeah, so there you go. Handy that little visual aid. I should also point out that the head with the neck is extremely flexible. A dog can look right behind itself. Say for neck, it sticks out from here can go all the way back like this, so much more flexibility in the neck. Then in between the two body blocks. Have some fun experimenting with those shapes, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Modified Boxes: Time to advance from a three cube approach to drawing a dog. This is what we started with. Now, this is it from the side view and from the top view. What's wrong with this? Obviously, it doesn't look a whole lot like a dog. Useful for positioning and plotting and spreading a few dogs around in a scene quickly, but we need to improve on it. Thing number 1, this is letting us down in, this is too wide. For our average dog, we need to narrow this down. That's the first thing to do. We are working within a narrower area. Let's change there and there we get it for that one. The next thing is we need to get rid of this corner. So we chop that off and have it at an angle. That's our back block. The front block goes to the halfway point, and we'll just take that down. We can also put in our squashing middle section and we'll do the same thing on the side view. We get rid of this back corner. This is a new block, it's angled like that. The front block. That's the side view, put in our squashing middle section and top view, front block and back block and squishing middle section. Next in heads, the neck of a dog is actually pretty narrow, obviously. Then the head. We want it to still be obviously one-head long, so you can draw a head like that. Triangle is raised, and let's take a tail on there as well. Same thing here. When the head for the eyes are about halfway from the back. Then we can work on the narrow neck, head. There's the nose, the eyes halfway and some triangles for eyes again there. Much narrower than we had before, and then we will work on some shoulder blades, shoulders, elbows. Because we pushed this in, when we're finding our halfway up the block, we need to move that in as well. There's our elbow, toes and then we just follow these lines assuming a symmetrical static pose to find the corresponding over there. Knee, ankle, foot, toes, corresponding toes, corresponding angle, corresponding knee and there's the hip over there. Same thing again over here, shoulder blades, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, toes. Thigh, knee, ankle, foot, toes. What you can really do is just fill in a few blanks. Chest is very deep on a dog so you can bring that down. A lot of muscle packed in here. The rib cage itself actually angles down like this, and these shoulder blades sit over the top up here, pocking that out with quite a little muscle. I will draw over the top of that with this pencil just to give our dog a little more personality. Shoulder, elbow, bunch of muscle packed in here, shoulder blades, the squashing connecting bit with obviously the spine is in there. Find the ankle, more thigh. Why this part of a dog is about here on the thigh and they go thick wide thighs. This is actually a head wide at that point of the thigh. It comes all the way out to where we had our original box. The widest parts other than that would be the wide part of the rib cage, which would be the three-quarters of a head and shoulders, which is the front part of the scapula shoulder blade, has a wide sticky out part, put the acromion and that's the widest part of the front of the body. Toes, forearm, wrist, hand, toes, foot and toes. Some people call them paws for some strange reason. I guess comparative anatomy-wise, we call them toes. Nice deep chest and there is a dog in that position. Let's put some muscles in there, that's the bony old knee, some thigh muscle, bone in front of the pelvis, toe, heel, foot, toes. Squashing middle bit, deep chest, shoulder blades, lots of muscle packed around here, neck, triangles for ins, eyes halfway forward on the head. This little line here indicates the front of the masseter muscle which is a big fat muscle on the dog's face while putting his teeth together, and toes and wrist, forearm, elbow. That's pretty much it. Neck, ears, nose, eyes. I feel a little bit of tone in just because it's good for indicating form. This is the nice deep chest, this is the very muscular shoulder blade area. A bit of a shadow on his face because of his ear casting that shadow, and some muscles in the hip area, thigh muscle, like bicep muscle. There we go. What have we done? We've refined the shapes for our dog so it's more dogified than just three cubes joined together. Play around with those new shapes, draw them from all different angles, put your point of view down low, up high, to the left, to the right, above, below, all that stuff. When you're comfortable with those, then we can move on to the next lesson. 9. Mannequin Shapes: Now we're going to construct a useful mannequin, which will take a dog to a slightly more doggyfight degree from the very simplified blocky look that it had before. We'll start with the very simplified blocky liquids we had before. Let's draw the legs in real quick. The back feet being slightly outside of the bottom edge of the floor plane of the box, measuring across there to find the corresponding symmetrical points and simple block-shaped head. That's pretty much where we are up to now. In order to get it a little more doggyfight, let's, mannequinize it a little bit. The rib cage, for example, tilts slightly downward, so we'll give it more of a rib cagey shape. Now, when you're using shapes, they start getting rounded, it's important to keep track of which way it's facing. That's what squares and blocks are really good for because it's really easy to figure out which way things are facing. Just make sure you don't lose track of that. Slightly narrower at the front. We'll keep the block shape for the pelvis, and then we connect the two with the, there we go. Actually, we can bring this down a little further, but I'll put the legs in first. Then we put in the thighs as just blocks. The blocks are now becoming shaped a little different, so we're getting a little more refined. The trickier part is the shoulder blades, which we'll get to in a moment, but we combine with the upper arm. We'll put the neck in and bear in mind, the neck is usually narrower than the head, and not a complete cylinder, it's a little flattened. Then for the head, we'll draw a square, a block, and then draw like a more triangular blockless that fits it to the front of it, and that gives you a more dark-shaped head. Now for these, and we'll just put some simple cylinders down here. For the feet, you can just use a little bit like lids of things you might have in your kitchen, so cylinders. Those thighs again on the other side. Keep it less and square-shaped. We can bring this line down a little further so the side of it is a little deeper there, and we'll just put a little shading on the side of the rib cage. We'll shade it on the side of the neck and the head, and this be here. For the front of the arm, we're going to combine the shoulder blades and the upper arm. We're going to draw a shape like this. That's the front side of it. Which works quite nicely and the thing that's nice about it is it can move, swaying back and forward, pivoting around him or less. Let me go to the foot and the toes. But this angle is not fixed because you have to remember that dogs have these bones inside and the bones hinge here, and they hinge here. This shape could be anything from almost straight out to folded up pretty extremely. That's going to really influence the shape of this piece of your mannequin. You need to bear that in mind, and I'll show you what I mean. We can start a new dog. Start with the thin end of a Rubik's Cube, slightly thinner than proper cubes, and we'll just begin the same way we always begin. There's pelvis, front legs, back legs, neck, head. Let's say instead of having the legs in this position, we want to have the dog moving more like this and the other shoulder blade could be more like that and the back leg could be if it's just ambling along and slow walk. The back leg could be like that and the other back leg to be like that. It's not trotting or anything, it's just walking along. Now that changes the shape of these. There's one that's heading backwards, and we can just use a simple cheap there for that and the one that's coming forward, the angle is less obtuse here and more open here, more obtuse suspense. These are the shapes we're dealing with. Same thing for the neck. Nothing changes really there. That's taking your dog from our initial very simple square shape into something that's heading way more towards dogginess and, of course, a couple of ears never hurt at all. An excellent form of practice is to find photographs of dogs but just Google them, whatever. Just doing different things, leaping around, what have you, and just draw these mannequin shapes over the photographs just to get used to seeing these bones in their various positions, identifying them, getting comfortable with these shapes, and then we can move on to the next lesson. 10. Constructing Two Dogs Playing: Let's just draw some dogs doing some doggy-type things. We will start with a square shape. We'll just do a few. Remember, they're a little thinner than cubes. I'm going to just go with the flow a little bit with this and then I'll go over them and see what other things that would be useful to fit in there. But I'll just draw them first and we'll see what we end up with. There's a lot of the things that I've shown you up to now. I keep them in the back of my mind while I'm drawing. If you keep things light, you can change your mind. Just like I said, I didn't like the way that was looking so I'll make it more like that. We've got a little dog here, they're playing with a ball between them. All I'm using this initial cube for is just to give myself a sense of proportion and a reference point to draw these other forms around. So dog's ears come up when they're engaged. Put a little smile on his face. Then we've got the neck and the shoulder blades. Actually, let's change the shoulder blades. The shoulder blades tend to mirror the fore in terms of the direction that they're facing. If the forearm is facing out in front, the scapula is pointing in the same direction. For this one, if its forearm is there, scapula is there, I'm going to assume it's a more or less type rule. You can use things that dogs wear as well to help you figure out their forms. The important things about figuring out when it comes to the forms is just the direction that things are facing. If this was wearing one of those things, it's good for separating this whole scapula and arm area. Collars are good for giving you direction of the neck. Another important thing to not do, which I tend to do a little bit so I'm always aware of it because when you're drawing things overlapping, you tend to stretch them out a little too far, whereas they should be a little more squeezed in. I should probably get his neck a little shorter and bring his butt in a little closer. That's just something that I noticed I have a tendency to do. And if I do it, I'm betting, other people do it too. Anyway, we've got the foundation of some nice dogginess there. Let's just fill them in a little bit more. Here we've got the elbow, forearm, wrist. We're just having a little fun trying to get a little liveliness into it. You don't achieve that by moving your pencil quicker or anything like that. It is decisions that you make. You look at the dog and you decide what you want to emphasize. What would his other arm be doing? Maybe it'll be just supporting him over here, spread out. This dog is like, "I've got the ball Elbow, forearm, toes. This is the ribcage which is quite deep and is quite narrow at the front from side to side. It's wide through here. It's narrow at the front. The shoulder blades go over the top of, the spine has spines that stick up that all these various muscles attach to. But we can get into that later in another lesson. But for now, we're just fitting the shapes in and around each other, putting a little bit of life into it. Here we go, flap his ears around. There's a couple of dogs having some fun together. I'll just darken in those lines a little bit. After I've done that, I'll put mannequin forms on it. These are all things that you keep in the back of your mind and you use them for working out like I said, the direction things are facing mostly. This shape here. It's that big masseter muscle that is one of the biting muscles. Dogs have got more than one biting muscle. I think I mentioned before it's easier to hold a mouth's dog than to open it. If you have a dog and you've ever tried to get anything out of its mouth, I'm sure you're aware of that. There are a couple of dogs and now we will just draw over them with the mannequin approach. The pelvis area, the ribcage, and it gets narrower towards the front. Then you've got this because that gives room for the shoulder blades to slide over the front of them, of the ribcage here. Then we've got the neck. Then for the head, we can draw a box shape with a smaller one sticking out the front. Mannequins are really great for breaking the shapes of these things down. I like to have a flexible-ish rod, not really a rod but like an elongated box that connects the pelvis area to the ribcage. These legs will do. They're quite thick, so the thigh is the thick part. The rest of it can either be tubes or any will do. We've been doing boxes pretty much all the time. Why break the habits of a lifetime? Let's do another little box there and another one there. That's that one. In this one, we would have the pelvic block there through the spine coming down. The ribcage like I said, it's angled down. There's the pelvis, read is angled down, and then you've got room for the shoulder blades over the top. So that's what's going on here. Here we have muscle-packed shoulder blades. Now the bone goes here to here, to here. But this is pretty much filled out with muscle so we can just draw that as a shape. Keep it boxy. A triangular box for the dog's head here, for the snout. You've got a square-shaped back-end and then I get this triangular nose, eyes, ears. One dog's face. A couple of other shoulder blades going in here. That's pretty much it. They're breaking down into a mannequin. Practice drawing some dogs in various fun poses, let's not forget the neck, and break them down into mannequins. Boxy simple shapes, you have to get more elaborate with this in order for it to look more like a dog and less like a square shape that we started with. But after you've had some fun doing that, we can move on to the next lesson. 11. Unboxing the Skeleton: We're going to draw a skeleton into a boxy dog. The important thing is maintaining proportions. We will just draw where we always start out with a book Sea Dog. We need this to be thinner. We make his ribcage portion halfway back. But because we've made it thinner, this line actually goes in here down along the top two. Here is a ribcage portion and the pelvic portion. We drew that book with a tilt that way. We have the neck which sticks out from a point and for the bagless one head length, which would be one head length, we draw a box for the head itself. Maybe we angle that down a little bit. The perspective is not very extreme here for the sake of clarifying proportions and stuff, don't want to go with extreme with the perspective. We have the shoulder blades, elbows, the halfway and new boxes here because it's a little thinner. Halfway up that box would be the elbow. Turning this into a skeleton. It's a little bit tricky, but it's definitely worth it. Then the feet up back in little ways. We just put the toes, feet, forearm. Then, I've noticed actually the knees tend to be a little wider than the ankles in just a regular standing pose. We can put the feet back here just outside of our ground plane box. We'll just move our knees this way a little bit. A couple of important points to note. Just pull this knee over here as well. This is what you'd notice that this knee is wider than this one. These angles are closer together. We using these lines with little perspective to figure out these corresponding, since it's a symmetrical pose. Here's a boxy dog. A couple of important points to note is that in a side view, the thigh and the foot mirror each other pretty much most of the time. If it looks just lying down and stretching his legs that might be different but and also the forearm and the scapula. The forearm and the scapula is a little more in this direction, but these two state consistent relative to each other. If the forearm ends up in this position, then the scapula ends up in that position too so something to bear in mind. Anyhow, so what we're going to do now is turn this boxy thing into a skeleton. We have the, there's a spine that runs down the outside of the scapular and then they split this part of the sticks out wider. It protects the shoulder joint. There's also an attachment for various muscles. That's good to know. We've got the upper arm bone and then the elbow, and then the foot, and then the toes, as you can see I'm not exactly being super detailed with this. It's definitely good to be aware of all this stuff though. There's the elbow, humerus. I see the humerus curves. This part has a curve to it so the humerus curves in this direction and then back again. I mean, this may be exaggerated a little bit here. Then the elbow extends up past these hinges around it has muscles and tendons attach to the back part there. That's important. Then we have our ribcage. Then we're going to make this a rounded shape, which means we have to be very careful to be aware of which way it's facing and where the sides go, you can flatten the size if it helps. I would definitely say, dotted line or something just to be aware of the centerline because the center-line will help you stay on top of which way it's facing. There's a neck now for the skull, canine teeth, the teeth, lower jaw, eyes are about halfway. Thus the sunglasses effect I mentioned in a different lesson. But they tilt backwards and outwards a little bit. Like the front toes forwards, the top tilts backwards. They like if you took your sunglasses and years twisted to the lenses to wrap around your head a little more. This a little bit that sticks have the lower jaw attaches to a point at the back of the skull. You don't have to worry too much about that. Then we've got this sharing the big scary teeth. They're the ones that overlap the lower jaw teeth and slice chunks of meat off of her adult dog is looking to eat. Then we have the pelvis and the spine. We don't need to get into too much detail there. This point connects to the pelvis. The title is an extension of the spine. We'll draw that. Then we've got a phi. Now, the knee of a dog extends. You've got the top, the bottom of the thigh, the top of the tibia and the patellar in there. All this shape here is the knee is quite big. It talks me a there's the bone, there's the other bone. There's like a lot of borny knees has quite a lot of space there. There's the other one. Then the heel extends past the end of the bottom of the tibia. That is that. This tendon attaches from the heel, then has the gastrocnemius calf muscle and fixes into the back of the thigh bone. It goes from like here to here. That's what keeps these two bones in alignment. Because it doesn't really stretch very much. That's a useful thing to know. Here we have the toes. This is a pretty simplified dog skeleton. That would be if you want to get further into it than that. The important point is that, I guess this would be the equivalent of the issue, tuberosity of the person is a point at which the muscles, like the leg, biceps, and stuff attach back here. But for now, we're just drawing the skeleton. This is what we got. We could draw some ribs. Why this part of the ribs is behind the scapula and again, I'm not like counting the ribs or anything, and there's like spines along the rib-cage. Another ribcage on the actual spine itself above the ribcage, which provides attachment points for the scapula. The way the scapula just stays to the body, it's not hinged directly bone to bone with the body itself, it's hinged to the upper arm, how it connects to the body's muscles which hold it in place. They hold it to the ribcage in this direction and they hold it to the ribcage in this direction and has muscles that are taking it up to the neck and the head. It can slide around a fair bit. I mean, it can slide forwards. It can slide upwards, which is why when a dog's walking, you might notice one of them is higher than the other one. The one with the white on it obviously is higher up. You can slide back and forward. Not a massive amount but enough to really is the top portion of the leg. Really, you have to think about it that way. More or less, you can think of it as pivoted here, for the most part, but just be aware that that pivot is mobile, it's not fixed. Definitely useful to know, and yeah for now, just like copy this. By all means, go find yourself more accurate dog skeletons online or something if you want to, get yourself a plastic dog skeleton, I mean, that's a very useful thing and have a closer look at it. Good to be aware of. You don't have to learn it in massive detail, but I would definitely be aware of it. Let me just keep it fairly simple, that is a spine, like anyone dog skeleton from our dog boxes. Become more familiar with drawing dogs skeletons and being aware of how the skeleton fits into our initial box structure. That's very useful. Then we can put muscles over the top of that and see how it affects the surface form. 12. Introducing Anatomy: The anatomy is a huge subject in and of itself. I just want to give you a quick introduction and point out a few things. I'm using a plastic model skeleton of a boxer dog so that would explain why the skull is squished in short shape unlike our standard dog, which is more elongated and regular looking. The first thing I want to point out is that the legs, front and back, you can think of ignoring the toes as a three-part mechanical system whereby, you've got the top part, the middle part, and the bottom part. What's important is that there's a fourth part, which is on the front, the long head of the triceps, and on the back the calf muscle and the tendon that goes from the heel to the back of the thigh. The function of those, because they don't stretch very much, is to maintain the relative positions of the blue-green parts of the system so that they're more or less parallel with each other. When the leg bends forward and when the leg bends back, those two bones just move in a parallel fashion. That's pretty important. I'll turn off those now and move on to all the other bits and pieces I've been mentioning as I've been drawing these dogs. The muscles around the upper arm and the shoulder are pretty bulky. Those are called some chest muscle in there and some throat muscles and neck muscles. The neck muscles come up from the scapula and run into the spine of the neck and the back of the head and stuff. We also have the front thigh muscles and the back thigh muscles, which are much thicker. The thickest part through the dog is actually midway down the leg biceps there. The glutes on a person, the gluteus maximus is the big, large, powerful muscle because its job is to rotate your pelvis and the rest of your torso up around the hip joint, but on a dog that's not required. The gluteus medius is the larger muscle of the two. The gluteus maximus is just this little toodle-oo thing. We've got these long muscles running along the spine. The spine of the dog there is very flexible in a folding forwards perspective. I tend to think of it as a big rubbery plank. Listen, the muscle is running between the pelvis and the rib cage. The overall effect on the surface form is that you have this big thick rubbery plank in-between the hindquarters and the rib cage area. We have some biting muscles, the overall effect of these muscles is a bit like that. As you're looking at reference photos of dogs and especially short head dogs like pit bulls and stuff like that, there's lots of interesting lumps and bumps, which you're really going to want to know what they are. There's lots of anatomical resources around to study. I would highly recommend maybe get yourself a little plastic skeleton of a dog or find yourself some other anatomical references and enjoy discovering exactly what all those lumps and bumps are. Bear in mind also that, just because you know it's there doesn't mean you always necessarily have to draw it in a flexed position, because obviously, you're not always flexing all your muscles at the same time. If you drew your organic creatures with permanently flexed muscles in every position, then it would look very strange, bear bear that in mind. Sometimes you see him sometimes you don't kind of a thing. That's a very brief primer on anatomy of a dog. Enjoy studying that and exploring what all those lumps and bumps are. 13. Skeleton and Surface Form: Let's see how the skeleton affects the surface form of a dog in a sort more lively pose. Let's say we have a dog and it's playing and it's elbows are out here, it got it's paws out. It got it's head maybe over here. We're drawing in the skeleton now. We got canine teeth. The other teeth, 3 teeth before you get to the big scissorly teeth. This is the zygomatic arch, which is an arbitrary that allows the lower jaw to go up through and underneath it. Pivot is back here, has a little bit of the sticks Alpha opening the jaw with a muscle that attaches to the back of the skull. But anyway, so we'll do the spine and the pelvis, and the femur, and the tibia. This is the heel bone and the foot of the dog and its toes there. The rib cage. When we're drawing these more rounded shapes, definitely keep track of where the sides are and where the center line is. Anyway, we have, sometimes it's more helpful to draw the way you want the feet to be first. There's the foot. Then there's the forearm and the elbow. Then you can figure out what your elbows goes, sometimes it's just a little easier and then you work out where the upper arm and the scapula goes after that. There's the foot and the toes, elbow. Then we have the upper arm and the scapula, which mimics more or less the angle of the forearm. If the forearm is going this far back then the scapular is going that far back as well. Just draw that in there. Spine, don't have to worry about any detail there. Tail. We'll just put the other heel in with the foot and the toe bones. As you can see, I'm not getting too fancy with my rendering of these bones. More important thing is the overall shapes and having an idea of how they influence the surface. We now draw the nose which extends beyond the skull of the front there. The ear canal is back here so you can just draw your ears flapping around from this point here. The throat goes down into the bottom of this opening. Then this neck muscles extend up from the scapula into the back of the skull their and along with spine. The elbow has triceps coming off of it and then you've got lots of big muscles in the shoulder blade area. Deltoid coming in here as well. There might be a more dog friendly name for some of these muscles I'm using, basically the people version. There's the bony part of the elbow. Forearm muscles in here and then there's a little thumb their. Obviously the thumb is on the other side so you don't see it. The widest part of the rib cage is back here, its usually the back-end of it. Then the spine, the ribs are connected to the pelvis and there's muscles along the spine. They fill out this area and create a ridge in here. Then you have the gluteus medius muscle, gluteus maximus, tiny thing there. Then you've got the leg biceps and the front of the thigh muscles. The bony parts are important to pay attention to. Back here is usually sharp where the heel is. You've got your toes. Could make this bigger and this is thicker as well. I put her toes in here, foot, and then the belly. There's usually a skin fold in here and skin fold in here, so bear that in mind. There is the tail. This is how the skeleton affects the surface form. The muscles fill this area out like a pig old slab of meat on the side of the body there. Same thing on the other side, chest muscles coming in and brachialis or bicep muscle comes in here as well. Their is the thumb. Yeah, that's how the skeleton affects the surface form of art dog. 14. Rotating Skeleton from Different Perspectives: I thought it might be useful to include a rotating plastic model dog's skeleton. It's actually a boxer dog. I filmed it with a telephoto two times, zoom type lens for the first few angles. After a while, I then switched to a wider angle lens where you can get the camera closer to the skeleton itself. The effect being a more increased perspective distortion when the lens is closer to the object like here. When you saw it earlier, it was further back from the object and zoomed in and so the perspective effect is less exaggerated. But nonetheless, pause it and look at it, sketch it, is a useful thing to have. Enjoy that and have fun sketching it from different perspectives and angles. 15. Pose Analysis - Scratching: We're going to analyze tricky poses in this lesson. I recently saw a dog scratching itself, getting into a very convoluted pose and very pretzely and I thought, well, that's pretty amazing, I'm going to have to look into that. It was essentially this. He put his foot all the way up to its neck, behind its ear. What I noticed was that its chest, because it had this pattern on its chest, was way lower on this side than this side. Then the elbow was all the way down here and the paw was like that. This one the elbow was higher and the arm was a little straighter. This is what the pose looked like in a nutshell. I'll just show you what I'm doing here, how I'm thinking about it. How we can recreate it from all different angles and stuff. We can just do the foot, having a good old scratch there. It could be flapping around. Here's the approach anyway to figuring it out. I do like dogs doing the same thing so I could figure it out exactly. If you have a dog sitting, the pelvic block, and the chest block, the pelvic block is going straight up, the toe pops out here, the legs go like this. Chest block is here. The shoulder blades come down, so it's just dogs sitting and the spine is connecting these two. Now the first thing that I noticed in this pose, is that this block is tucked all the way under. What you're ending up with is the spine coming up back there, you're ending up with the chest block here in a similar position. But this block has just voted itself right under. The reason it does that is because this leg sticks out forward from here and it wants to get it up, so it has to fold this all the way back so that it can get it's leg up. The next thing it needed to do was bend in the direction of where its itch was. Here's its itch. It needs to bend itself in that direction. If this is the pelvis with the spine coming out. It's now got to lean in that direction. The other thing it did, was rotated away from that itch. It leans towards the itch and rotates away from the itch. This is the front of the chest box. It's rotated more towards us. Maybe we'll see a little bit of this side still. Still tilted forwards. There's a hole, in the front of the chest box through the rib cage, for the neck to come out and so I'll just draw that in there as well. Here's the neck, in front of the chest. From here, we can figure everything out. Put all the bones and everything in the right place. His head would be out here because he wants to scratch his neck there. The shoulder blades come from around the back of the rib cage. Actually what I'm going to do is increase this, because it seems to have lost a little bit of that, because I already wanted this lean here. Let's make sure we got plenty of that. There we go. Readjusting things as you go, you have to do that. Shoulder blades come from around the backside Shoulders, arms with the elbows and this is arm is straighter, supporting it on the ground. But this elbow is way lower and this forearm sticks out more like this, because its chest is down at this angle. The neck sticks out. They're flapping around, because he's getting goodly scratched in there. Now we can have this leg coming up, giving his foot access to the itchy area. This leg, I'm going to fold it up here. Forearms, hand, toes, forearm, hand, toes. There'd be like tricep muscles in here and big old shoulder muscles back there. This is the upper arm here. The chest muscle is going way lower down the arm than they do on a person. A little bit like pulling your T-shirt down over your arms or something. Pinning them into your size a little bit. Then we go to our rib cage into the pelvis. The tail would be tucked away over here, so it comes out the back here when it's in the normal sitting pose with this tucked all the way around, the tail is trapped over here so the tail would be coming out from the side there or something. That's it in a nutshell, kind of quickly. I'll just bash in a little bit of flat tone there just so that we see a silhouette of that dog. That being too distracted by the orange blocks inside, and the middle of his rib cage is there. That's the approach that I take to analyzing something so that you can then recreate it from a different position, different angle, different elevation. In theory, you should be able to just take these blocks, put them anywhere in perspective and then build your dog around it. What we did was, constructed a dog having analyzed the pose and we'll do another one in the next lesson. 16. Pose Analysis - Leg Lifting: This time we're going to analyze what happens in the standing pose of a dog when it lifts his leg. A while ago, having not particularly looked at that pose, I just thought I'm going to try and draw it without sort at it first and see how right or wrong I get it by comparing it to some reference that you can dig up on Google. I got a bunch of stuff wrong so I could then figure out what I got wrong and pass that information along to you. Here's a standing dog prior to lifting his leg. What happens was what I was wondering. Well, let's say lifts this leg, that means that the weight from all of this backend has to sit over this foot, assuming it doesn't move that foot. The first thing that has to happen is this has to move this way. The other thing that happens is these two blocks bend towards each other. They bend towards each other like this. The other thing that happens is that the pelvis block also tilts up like that. What does that look like? Well, this block now occupies a space over here, is bent in that direction and also tilted upwards, so you got something like this for that pelvic block. That foot stays the same, so this leg gets a little more stretched out, because the hips move from here to here, and this is basically just doing that. Nothing much changes at the front end, maybe changes the position of his head. I'll just draw that in with a darker color so you get a good look at that. We can just draw that tail in, pelvic area. There'll be some creases because it's scrunching up on this side so. Go to the shoulder blades, shoulder muscles, triceps muscle, elbow, forearm, and toes, and the forearm, and the hand, and the toes on the other side, and then goes lumpy-bumpy here. The ribcage is going down. Probably that neck's a little too low. There's the thigh, cuff, foot, toes, and this leg is the one that's lifted up. Then we got that foot, will see the bottom side of that, with some toe pads. That's utilizing the blocks, figuring out where the weight would shift. When you bend, things get closer together, so the backend of the dog has to move in a little, it has to move over this way a little, in order to accommodate that pose. You always have to be thinking when you're moving one shape relative to another, would it have to get nearer, or how would that work? I will just quickly, dropping these blocks here so you can get a look at how that looks. There's orange blocks that we use to figure out the pose of that dog. 17. Contour Lines : This is a fun contour exercise to get you used to thinking volumetrically where the thin is, where the thick is. I've drawn a couple of dogs that I drew from reference because I didn't want to run into any copyright issues for photographs I found online. I would advise you just go find yourself a bunch of photographs and just draw all over them. What we're thinking is we're concerned with where it is wide and where it gets narrow. For the rib cage, that's wider, just behind the whole shoulder blade area here. Then the thighs get wider here and then narrower towards the front. There's a depression here and then wide a bit again for the bone and this is for the tendon, the Achilles tendon that goes between the heel and the back of the femur. Then you've got thicker bits and thinner bits here the front of the leg, gets thicker towards the back of the leg because that's where there's more muscle. Gets wider hair and then goes narrower, wider, wider still. Around the neck it's wider. Then it gets narrower here and wider again. Through the shoulders, the upper arms wider, and then it goes in between the throat and these shoulder muscles and upper arm muscles. There's a depression usually so you get the contour doing that. Ignore that line there. I've noticed the front of the foreleg is pointed, like it's triangular cross-section, like a shin I guess. Do this on a whole load of photographs of dogs that you find. Make sure that the photographs are probably more 3/4 angle, camera's not dead level. If you've got a dog just facing you flat, you're not going to really be able to do anything with your contour lines, so find ones that are angled, camera maybe a little higher or something. Just have some fun doing that and you'll start discovering where the forms get thinner and where they get thicker. It will make you curious as to why, and you'll start looking into the skeleton and the muscles with more interest because you're looking to see why these things are bulging here and why they have hollows there. It will just be more directed so your research into the skeleton and the muscles will be more focused and I thoroughly recommend doing this, plus it's fun. There you go. 18. Boxes vs Round Shapes: What about round shapes? I'm often drawing round shapes to get to where I'm going, and I keep saying focus on boxes. What's the deal there? Plus you see animators and they always construct the heads and stuff with these round shapes. The point being that when they do this and when I do this, say where you've got the line that's running through the center and the line that's running around the center cross each other, that gives you a point. When you put a little cross on the side of the head, that gives you another point. You may or may not actually be drawing this once you understand and comfortable with this whole box-like process, but what this gives you and what this gives you is an axis. That axis goes through to the other side of the bowl where there would be another cross and that axis line, whether you do this off the side of the page or whether you do it in your mind, it gives you an axis line that relates to a box. This one here would also have an axis line that relates to a box too. There's two axis lines from which you can just build a box from one axis line. Once you've got an axis line in your mind, you can start relating other lines, whether it's are on each side of the circle relative to each other, following along on that axis line. These axis lines are basically the edges of boxes. This is what's going on in the mind of me and other people that are drawing using a lot of circles. If you just try and draw from scratch without having grasped this concept and got comfortable with it, if you just try and draw things with circles and you just want to like put some eyes on here and some ears there and the nose, it's so easy, especially when you're trying to add things to other things to just end up with a really nebulous blobby mess. Because you don't know where anything is relative to anything else, you've got my fixed points. What the box method gives you is fixed points. When something is on this side, this correspondingly something on this side, or you're aware of the front and the center, and so that's why the box method is much more important. Let's say, I'm just going to draw something difficult. Let's say we are drawing a dog and I'm using a sort thing because I'm comfortable with that. But let's say we're looking up at a dog and the dog is barking or yawning or something. We have a dog, we can draw his head here, we can put his ears back here, we can put his neck here, we can put his throat here. That's not too terrible stuff for a drawing of a dog stretching its mouth and having a yawn or bark or something. But what you need to bear in mind is that while I'm drawing all this with the circles, you get a hint when I just drew that line there that I'm relating these to each other. This is the front of a box, which is in my head. The hinge of the jaw back here would relate also to this line, so the other side of the hinge would be over here. The front of the chin, similarly, you're using these lines from the box. So constructing things in this way just gives you the ability to stay on top of complicated things, and when you start looking up at stuff, it gets really confusing and it can get really confusing really fast, so it's good to have all that stuff in mind. When we draw our dog's mouth and we maybe see the roof of his mouth and we know that it's got those ridges like it's got these ridges that go like this, we can draw these ridges relative to these lines here. Then you got a tooth there and a tooth here that you just see sticking out. Without thinking in this way in the back of your mind, it just makes turning objects in space when you're trying to draw something from an awkward angle really hard. I mean, don't make it harder for yourself than you have to. That's how to save yourself some headaches and why it's really important to grasp this and get comfortable with it so you can start drawing things from weird angles and you won't get yourself into too horrible of a mess. Have a practice. Draw things with just circles and then start working boxes into them and just see if it helps you, and just post it to your project and then move on to the next thing. 19. Extreme Perspective: How about really extreme perspective? Let's draw a box and it's in quite extreme perspective. We are very close to this corner here, and so because we are close to it, the perspective is more exaggerated. When the perspective becomes exaggerated, the halfway mark along the box appears further back. If you were seeing this box from far away, it would look more like this. The halves would be pretty even because we're a long way away and there's not much perspective distortion. You can imagine being zoomed in on a zoom lens from far back that's what you'd see. But when you're closer to it, the foreground part becomes much bigger in your plane of view than the background part. If we're drawing a dog's head, let's say, we'll put his nose here, his nose is gigantic in our point of view. We draw a center-line across the body there with body across the head and we'll just put where the eyes would go. The eyes go halfway back but the back of the head is pretty small relative to the nose as you can see because of this perspective effect. Then things will start getting smaller, the lower down you go as well. Our little dog hair is looking a little confused as to why his nose looks so big. He's always self-conscious about the size of his nose and when he sees himself like this, he just gets very distraught but it's just the way you are looked at and or photographed. If you'd imagine taking a picture of a dog with a wide-angle lens or a fish eye lens or something like that. This is the end result. Here, we get smaller as I drift further away from us. You can see what the difference is when you're close to a thing as opposed to when you're far from a thing because the dog's head would just look more normal. His eyes would be here his ears would be here, the back of his head would be occupying half the space of the whole thing and then you get this one. That's what your dog's head would look like when you're looking at it from further away and the perspective effect is less pronounced. This is what it looks like when you're arriving close. It just exaggerates the perspective and distorts everything more. There you go how to handle extreme perspective and I'll just put that box back in here so it's nice and clear. There you go. Have a fun practice just drawing these boxes in extreme perspective as if you're looking right at them close to you and other ones that are looking further away. Draw the same thing inside the boxes and just experiment and see and then post them to your project. I mean, it's good to see your progress. Other people will enjoy seeing your progress and I'll check it out too and then we can move on to the next lesson. 20. Use Reference, Don't Be Its Slave : One really good way to practice drawing things and get better at it is to look at some reference and draw what you saw from a different angle. Because in order to do that, you have to break it down and analyze it and think about what you're drawing. I was just having a little nose around on the computer and I saw some dogs, jumping over some things, so I'm just going to draw what I saw. I was looking at a picture that was from the other side and it was from a different height than this. I'm just seeing what I can remember and I'm just drawing that and I'm keeping it very loose. This loose thing is another drawing with these circles and stuff. I mean, you can run into problems with it in the structure is vague. But if you're bearing all that stuff in mind, then it's a really good way to just loosely get yourself into a pose. For starters, learn your way into things with the boxes and being aware of which direction everything is facing and then once you've got the hang of that, you can start to have a little more fun with a looser approach. Then as you're doing these loose lines, they start to suggest little bits of anatomy and shapes that you just spot as you're going. You just notice them and it's like, oh yeah, I'll draw that. There are more dogs jumping over this thing than this, but for now, since I want to keep this fairly brief, I will not go crazy. You couldn't see any of the bottom half because of the legs down here because it was a long grass and stuff. Yeah, this is a useful way to use reference and a looser approach to working your way into a drawing. The big shapes, the shoulder blades and the muscles around the shoulder blades and neck, some wrinkling because the neck is extended and smushed in there bit. We can draw the knees tucked up here and the muscles around would be bulging because this is all folded up. This dog, we have his ear flapping around a little bit too. This was the apex and his ears have flown up, hang in the air for a bit and then flop down. Here's those muscular shoulder blades and there's the rib cage and have a fold there. Everything's a little bit bunched up here and gripping with his little grippy paws. This is the flexors of the forearm elbow here, and then the triceps. We've got this angle and this angle we need to bear in mind that mirror each other. Get those shoulder blades in there. The bony around here, bulging muscles, calf muscle. We'll have his paws grabbing onto the top of the thing there. The masseter muscle there. We have a too Chevy drawing of a dog. Another thing to bear in mind is this angle here mirroring this angle here of the shoulder blade. That's a little correction I can make just to emphasize that a little further. There you go. That's a good way to use reference to learn to draw dogs better. Look at something, leave it behind, go away and draw what you saw. By all means start with just trying to remember what it looked like from the same angle. But you get a lot of mileage out of changing the angle, because then you have to really think about what it is you're looking at or what you saw. Have fun with that. Yeah, I might just throw a little bit of shading in. See what that looks like. Just shading around these muscles here. Just a little bit around the rib cage. There's always well, not always, but depending on the dog, but this area here quite often has a pretty deep hollow underneath it. You got cast shadow from this dog onto the bottom of the log would be in shadow. This isn't stuff that I'm remembering. This is just knowing a little bit about forms and their light hits them and cast shadow from this log onto this one. The shadow of the log itself put a little bit glossy look under there, a bit of shadow around that masseter muscle. Look for sharp lines and curved lines and contrast them against each other because it's always a good way to give it a little bit of spring to your drawings is if you have little flat bits, especially in between bulges. If you have a bulge and then a little flatbed and then another bulge, like if these are both muscles and you've got like something flare in between, just gives a little more spring. It's a little flashy, flabby if it's all like, there's nothing. Often this would indicate like a piece of bone or something with muscles on both sides of it. It's always good to be on the lookout for stuff like that, say here and here. It just gives a little more spring to you. You got your sharp angles and your round angles. It's a nice way to give a little more life into your drawings. Who doesn't want a little more life in their drawings. We can put a little more cast shadow onto the top of this here log from the dog. A bit more shading in here. The light is coming from this direction. That little flat area there and nice bowls there. I mean, it just gives it a little bit of spring, we always want to be on the lookout for that. Anyway, took a little drawing of a couple of dogs leaping over a thing. It gave me a little bit more with some shading and darken up some lines to bring things in front of other things. We want this ear to really stand out from this other stuff behind it. A little bit lost in there. Yeah, just sharpen that up a little bit. Yeah, that was drawn from having spent some minutes looking at some dogs jumping over some things from a different angle. I just flipped it around and turned off the computer, so I just figured out what's happening and reconstructed it and drawn it. That's what this constructive approach is really useful for. There you have it. Yeah, so go have some fun doing that. Find yourself some pictures of some dogs that are doing something interesting you like. Look at them for awhile, turn off whatever it is you're looking at them on or turn over your piece of paper or whatever, and go and draw it from the same angle at first and then from a different angle for a more challenging test of basically what you know. Just look at it as an opportunity to make some mistakes and screw up so that you can figure out what you don't understand and then get better at understanding it. I don't expect everything to happen all at once. Just take one thing at a time, be patient, and a cumulative effect if you do it on a regular basis, will be that you get to draw much better. 21. Expressions and Facial Muscles: Facial expressions. What do we have to work with? Well pretty much is the same as what you got to work with a person plus ears. You've got your eyes, the nose which you can wrinkle up, the mouth which can be very small, like pursing your lips, or it can go very big. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, eyebrows. It seems like we selected dogs for their eyebrows because the muscle that lifts the eyebrow which goes in here is like really stringy or nonexistent in a wolf, but in a domestic dog, very well-developed. It seems that we like that expression. Let's see what can we do then using those things. If we're going to have say a dog snarling, well we need to know where the skull is and this lower jaw can be closed. We need to know that the canines there and this is where the teeth go and the mouth. There we go. We see the canine and some other teeth, and some teeth in air as well. That's a part of a dog snarling. What else do we have going on? You can make the eyes angry with those eyebrows. We have the wrinkling here and a bit of a wrinkling in here as well. There's an adult who you would be very wary of approaching is go back. This are some wiggly. Here's a dog. You definitely would be not wanting to go and pet, or you might end up getting bit. I'm showing the whites of the eyes as well. This is another good way of just enhancing the angriness. There's an angry snarling dog. What about a bad smiling dog? We'll start with the same dog head again. Ears would be in a little bit more of a cheerful attitude. The corners of the mouth. You can just pull these faces yourself if you can do them. Pretty much a dog can do them because they have very similar facial muscles, so you get a little crease in here. Mouth should be a little bit open. Flappy mouthy stuff comes down there. You might see the bottom teeth. You wouldn't see the top teeth. They show you their teeth when they're trying to make a point. Like with people, you can put crease in the corner of the eye there just to enhance that. There's more of a smile. Happy looking dog. We've got snarling, smiling. Let's have him maybe his nose here. If you imagine just passing your lips, making your lips go really small. The dog equivalent of that would look something along these lines. You have to think about this mouth shape and what it's doing. They quite often have their eyes closed or almost closed when they're howling. You might see the bottom teeth. The ears tend to be back when they're howling. This mouth shape here, I mean it's very variable and very expressive. Let's do a yawn. Have a yawning dog. We'll have a yawning dog. Let me do a yawning dog in profile. The skull, it's important for the yawning pose to have a sense of the skull. We get like the hinge here for the lower jaw. I would go like a hair under 90 degrees for a really big yawn. I would have to get a little less than 90 degrees. Here we have our mouth shape and nose again. Because it's being stretched, the nose can get pulled down a little bit here. The bone here of the skull, you might see a little bump on its nose. Again, its eyes could be closed as if it was having a good old yawn, ears back. It's really stretching out this mouth, stretching it as much as it can, might even pull it in a little bit this way. Look at those muscles here giving some shape to the face here. We've got the neck some 30 bits. There's a good old yawn and a tongue. We'll just draw the muscles onto the neutral face. Push down those [inaudible] further. There's our neck. Yeah, the muscles that activate these very expressive features would be the muzzle pad on a dog here on both sides and there's muscles which pull that back up to here. You can pretty much assume that any direction a muscle pulls in, the creasing will occur at 90 degrees to it. You get your creasing like that because these muscles are pulling up into here. You've got the muscle that runs all the way around the lips. That would be this muscle here. This muscle here. It's very expressive. Enables the dog to go [inaudible]. All those great expressions you can pull yourself feel what they feel like and then just apply them to your drawing. You got this muscle here that pulls up the eyebrow like that. Let's see what other ones do we have? Oh yeah, we have a muscle that comes from the top of the head down into the corner of the mouth here, which I guess you'd call the smiling muscle. When that one pulls, this is what we're getting, pulling on that. You've got your creasing happening at 90 degrees. As far as I pay any attention to a facial muscles of dogs that pretty much covers it. There are specific muscles for moving the ears around, but really when you're drawing ears moving around, you're just drawing ears moving around. Exactly where the muscles are and what they look like, they're bear buried underneath the skin and stuff so as long as you know they're having an effect on the ears and then you draw the effect on ears you don't need to get too heavily detailed into that stuff. Yeah, there's a few dog expressions and muscles to go with them. Again, we'll emphasize here that these muscles are creating these creases. This muscle here is having the effect on the shape of the mouth. There's other muscles that come in here that lift up this part of the mouth. I guess we'll just quickly draw that one as well, just for good measure. There is our dog. We'll just draw a quick skull. There's the biting teeth, canines of the teeth. Nose sticking out front there. Put the bottom jaw in. That's the bit that connects onto the back of the skull to open the mouth. Yeah, quick extra little skull drawing there. Yeah, this mouth part, you can get that going on and showing off, maybe you could pull it back further and show off some of those back teeth just to scare you away. You need a good sense of the underlying structure of the skeleton and these muscles here just to give shape to the head and put the teeth in the right place. Let's show a little bit of whites of the eye there. I guess it's fun drawing snugly dogs. Put that muscle pulling, so we'll just draw some more of those here back. If it was leaning forwards, really come in at you, then you'd be really worried, or I would be. Dog expressions with muscles that assist. 22. Learning Complex Forms: One way I use a box when I'm learning especially to draw a complicated shape, is really just to orient these directions here when you're building the shape so that you're keeping the box shape in mind. I'll show you what I mean. For example, I've been working on drawing a dog skull. The way I have approached it is, I look at the skull, and then I put the skull way, and then I draw the skull from my memory, and then I see how horrible job I made of it, and then maybe the next day, I draw the skull again. Whatever was the most grievous errors I made the day before, I make sure I don't make them again. Then the next day, or not even the next day, quite often just a bit later in the day, I'll draw another skull, and I just keep working through that until eventually I'm aware of the mistakes I've made before, and so I avoid making them again. I can walk you through that process while I'm sketching out this skull. I think of these as sunglasses because initially my first skulls they face too far forward. I noticed that they tilted outwards a little and they leaned forward to a certain extent. That was how I would work at where I put my eye sockets. You've got the zygomatic arch that comes out quite wide around here, and then you've got the sensory effect of the back teeth here. I keep making this too short from top to bottom. I'm making an effort now to make that a little bit longer. There's a part of the lower jaw that sticks out back here. What that does is it has a muscle attaches to a point that sticks out on the back of the skull, and when that contracts, it opens the jaw. Knowing the function of things helps you actually know how to draw them. This is what I'm saying with the box. This point here has a corresponding point on the opposite side. I think of it like a blob of a box of ballistic gel, when I'm drawing something inside of it. If bits poke out, that's fine too. When you put a point on one side, you find the corresponding point on the other side, and it just helps you stay organized in terms of your three-dimensionality. Another thing I've done is I have this plastic skull and I put rubber bands around it, so I can see that there's a rubber band around here. I don't have it in front of me right now, I'm going to get it in a little bit. Check for errors, because that's my process. It's a good way to learn stuff, and then another rubber band goes around here, and I know that it goes in a shape like this. I know that I need to have this a little bit further forward. Then I've got another rubber band, it makes a shape that's more triangular at the top. It goes to this point here, just on the jawbone, on either the jawbone it goes more like that. I'll just fill in my skull a little bit more now, and then I'll go get my skull and check, like I said, for errors. I know there's three teeth before the one that sticks up from the bottom, and then there's another teeth, a canine here, which I know it goes heads up in that direction. There's another tooth of incisors. This point of this tooth would have a corresponding point on this side, which you might just barely see, canine seems to stick out a bit. These teeth on the bottom, they head right back. Anyhow, there's a bit of a groove at the middle of the skull here. I noticed that I often need to adjust forwards. Having done this a bunch of times, it's like okay, I am aware of that, so I'll try and make sure I don't make that mistake. This goes into the molar teeth. On a dog, molar teeth they're like shears. They're like this, and I'm pretty sure I've got this area here a little bit too short already, and this is too big. I can tell from having done this a bunch of times before, and now I'm going to have to correct that. I know that you can't really see the eye socket on that side because like I said, with the sunglasses, they're tilted forward and like that a little bit too. That's how I remember that shape. We've got this rubber band that I was talking about. There's a corresponding point over this side, so you'd see a little bit of this part of the zygomatic portion there. In the living dog, there's a ligament that goes between these two points because this is open, which makes it more like an actual eye socket, but it's not in the case of the bones. I know the leg is pointy, it goes a little bit back a way like that, and you've got this bit that sticks out to attach the other end of that muscle too. This goes up and sits underneath here. See from the top these arches here. That's what the skull looks like from the bottom, I suppose. A little jaw a little bit going up in there, and then it articulates here. Here is where when it flops down, that's tucked up in there, and when it comes down is because this muscle has contracted. When it goes up, there's a whole load of muscles that are concerned with closing a dog's mouth, which is why I don't know if you ever got bitten by a dog, but if you did, I imagine is pretty painful. I would imagine, putting a dog's mouth open is a lot harder than closing it. See this part of this lower jaw. You've got just a whole load of muscles that fill in and they attach onto this and they pull this up. Then you got another bunch of a muscle that starts here, connects onto this, and pulls it really tight. These interlocking teeth they get really well squeezed. There's your dog's skull. I'll show you a bunch of how badly I did it. To start with, the early one you can see that I got my eye sockets so wrong. You see too much of that one. They're not tilted back in and out enough. I'll just look at the skull, see where I'm going wrong, draw all over what I've done with where I should have done it, and then the next time you do it, you get it less wrong. This was me experimenting with, okay, what if it was a super wide-angle, like the box that I drew was sharp, if you imagine it from a wide-angle lens? It's really distorted. I drew a really distorted skull and see how accurate it ends up being, like taking a picture of the actual skull with a wide-angle lens, jump on the front of my camera, i.e phone. Again, this is where I'm making this too narrow, so I have to pull this down more. The position of this little bit here I was getting wrong. Here's my rubber bands at different places. Long and thin, is hexagonal there, it's pentagonal there, and a more triangular back, until they go up as well. You make a bunch of mistakes and you fix them, and you notice what horrible things you've done, and then you make sure you don't do them next time, or at least, you try not to. But don't try and do too much at once. This is maybe a couple of weeks of me just going back and forth. It's worth doing. It's the best way I've found to actually get embedded in your head, shapes that are complicated and difficult. These are all drawn except for the red lines without anything in front of me. That's the way I would advise to use. A box is like a guide to keep you organized in a three-dimensional way, and just as a process of improvement. You have to make mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you won't get any better. Because if you just copy a thing, you don't even know what you're doing really, you're just copying a shape. You might be really good at it. I used to be really good at it when I was a kid. Eventually I thought, you know what, I want to be able to draw things without having to have them in front of me. I used to think, the old guys back in the day before cameras, how did they manage? I want to be able to do that, I say. That's the process. Make mistakes, notice your mistakes, fix your mistakes, and try to avoid making the same mistakes again, and then find yourself a new mistake. 23. Drawing Different Breeds: How do we deal with different breeds? The most important primary thing to deal with is to notice the different proportions. For example, let's say I had to draw a storyboard where I'll be drawing two dogs that are buddies over and over again. I need to have a pretty good idea of how to draw them and where the differences are. The first thing I noticed with say, the first dog which is a Greyhound, is that the arch of the back here breaks the square. The chest is so deep that it almost hits the halfway line down the shoulder. The upper arm is a little bit shorter, and the forearm is a little bit longer. Presumably, that has some effect on how fast they can run. It like a head which is very tapered and delicate looking. His ears, little detail. What was seemed to be a little wrinkled up. I mean, not always, but I looked at a bunch of different pictures of Greyhounds and the amount of times their ears have this wrinkle held back like they're a little bit scared or nervous or something. It's just the feeling, you get it from looking out of them. Fir is a little bit shorter than this lower leg. Again, I think that probably has something to do with them being able to run fast and very thin forelegs, very thin but very muscular and dainty little feet. Everything is built for minimizing the weight and getting them to move quicker. On the contrary, we've got a Bull Terrier. I'll just draw him facing this way. He has his squares longer. He's about two-thirds the height and his back is a little bit lower. He's with us or shoulder blades are a little bit higher. and he comes all the way down pretty much all the way across to the halfway point. His pelvis there, thigh, that we get this, he's got very stocky legs, thicker muscle here definitely not as nimble and he's got powerful neck. Head is the same length interestingly. But it's like, an American football or rugby ball or something that's where you around and beefy looking. This is was no use, here is sticky up and pointy powerful chest, powerful shoulders, and more like that. Yeah, if I was drawing these two in a story or something and they were like buddies or not buddies but I have to draw them both a bunch. That's what I'm looking for. Then you can hunt around for other small details of anatomy and other things that you might want to incorporate. But right off the back, you've got definitely a feeling that one of those is a Greyhound and the other one is a Bull Terrier, which is what we're looking for. In a three-quarter angle pose, I would keep this box very thin. This is square box. Then we've got the box for the Bull Terrier. Make that one much wider. Two-thirds the height, more less of this one, and he is a bit longer. We can draw his big powerful chest in here. I can put his back feet there and his elbows would be like way out to the sides, perhaps even a little pigeon towed. His shoulder blades, his back is about level with the top of the box, and his shoulder blades are higher. His neck is just coming off of the shoulder blades and his head is up there. Now Greyhounds, the arch of the lumbar back area breaks the top of this box. The pelvis is heading towards the vertical. We'll have the knee, shorter thigh, longer lower leg, then do the same on the other side. Then we'll put the ankles a little closer together, halfway point, the chest is like almost down to the halfway points. Big, powerful chest for a socket and all that air because they're just made to run, it's what they do. Slightly shorter upper arm and longer forearm. Then we got this dainty feet business going on down here and very muscular but thin, long-distance runner, which were they more sprint either. They're quite muscular, but just way less heavy obviously built than a Bulldog. I find that sometimes when I'm drawing dogs' heads, putting in the eyes and the nose is just a really good way to get a good feeling for the head. Sometimes it's even easier to draw those before I even draw the head. Sometimes. I mean, maybe it's just a cursory shape. But it definitely brings it all together when you stop putting those shoulder blades up here. Very muscular chest. You'll have that there, big thigh muscles. I may be exaggerating how wide he is for effect, but having drawn and figured out a basic sort dog up first, it gives you a really good basis when you're drawing some other kind of dog. Having drawn a basic dog, it's like, I need to make him wider, I need to make him lower, I need to make him longer, I need to do this and that. Anyway, let's now draw the head on the greyhound. He has a delicate head, and his ears have that wrinkly held back look like he's nervous. May not be nervous, but it's just how they look, Some muscles there. Throat, and these muscles, they have a dip between the throat area and the shoulder muscles. Because they're quite powerful and pronounced. You get actually really good if you're interested in learning more on the dog anatomy. Looking at greyhounds is pretty great because they're almost much cooler and a caulk figure because they got so little body fat. It's really easy to see everything. Dainty, powerful muscles in the inner thigh as well. You definitely get the sense, but if you had to guess which one was the greyhound and which one was the bull terrier. I don't think anyone would get it wrong. That's the main way to handle different breeds. It's 90 percent proportion, and then start looking for details after that. There you go. Just throwing a little bit of tone for good measure. By default seems to usually be having the light coming from top-left for some reason. Just a thing I noticed. Of course, if the light isn't coming from the top-left that's not an issue. But I just noticed when I throw a bit of toning without really thinking about it, that's usually the case. There you go. Just for good measure, we might as well draw them out on an adventure. Maybe they had a little bit too much to drink. So they may have to relieve themselves. Knees back there. This is tilted that way. Body is bent that way. The heads can be, okay. There's one of our two dogs and the other one, body's bent that way. Leg up in the air, very stocky little leg, other leg down, wide. Big long round head. Big wide round head. Little eyes, going to have beady little eyes these bull terriers. Hope they won't be lots of bull terriers beaten down my daughter who beat me up for saying they've got beady eyes, and slightly pigeon-toed look. I think they're just about takes care of that. The ellipse is a bit a little wider towards the bottom of this thing since our eye level is up here somewhere, and there we have it. Couple of little chummy dogs going around doing their chummy things. Fun practice would be pick a couple of breeds that are fairly different from each other. Something small, something big, something skinny, something broad, and figure out the main proportional differences and just have some fun drawing them in relationship to each other. That'll be a fun little thing to do. 24. Locomotion - Walks: Let's look at a dog walking. I'm going to do the left side legs in orange and the right side legs in blue. The most important immediate thing to bear in mind is that the right side and the left side are pretty much synchronized. When the right leg is in that position, the front leg is in the same position by a large, we'll get into a little more detail in a moment. But there's the left leg doing the same thing. At this exact moment in time as the right front leg touches down, the back left leg lifts off. But for our purposes, we'll just take this as all four feet on the ground situation and then see what happens next. Bearing in mind that the right side is in synchronicity and remember also the forearm and the scapular more or less at the same angle and the foot and the thigh of the back leg are more or less of the same angle. Both these feet stay on the ground. You've got the same thing going on front and back. For the back leg, the back foot takes off first and there's the foot. This one stays on the ground a moment longer. For the next phase, right side thigh and foot, again, they're at the same angle and they are matched with the front. The feet are on the ground, the legs are in synchronicity. The left side, this is a little staggered, so the back foot moves forward ahead of the front left foot. Now we move to basically the exact opposite of our first position, which is we've got the right side. These angles are matching and the limbs are in synchronicity and left side. Everything's on the ground at once, except in reality, this foot is now lifting off as this comes down. But for our purposes, we'll just have this as a whole feet on the floor situation for a nanosecond. The next thing that happens is that now the left side is in a matched synchronicity as the right side has to do it staggered motion. Foot portion forelimb matching each other. You wouldn't see on the other side there because of the body being in the way, but a scapula would be in the same angle more or less as the forelimb and the thigh would be in the same angle more or less as the foot. On the right side of the body, back foot takes off first, so we'll just have that there. Right foot trails behind a little bit. The right foot stays on the ground. Then in the final drawing, our left side is in synchronicity, so we match those with each other. Right foot has taken off and right front foot has also taken off for that staggered emotions. We'll just thicken up these legs a little bit. Have some fun playing around with that and then we'll move on to trotting. 25. Locomotion - Trotting: We move on to a dog trotting. The difference between trotting and walking is that it's the diagonally opposite limbs which move in unison. What we end up with is something like with all four feet on the ground, we have something along the lines of this and then the trailing limbs will move forward, so they'll take off so this one and this one was these two remain on the ground, so that would look like and again, you have the thigh and the foot mirroring each other. On this front, you'd have this would be remaining on the ground. For the other side, we'd have that foot on the ground and this foot would be, lifting off. Again, you've got the forearm mirroring the thigh and the foot of the back foot because they're operating sort unison that way. On the side, on the limbs that are connecting to the ground, you have this angle mirroring this angle, which of course the forearm mirrors of the scapula and the foot mirrors the thigh, but we would like to see that of course on the other side. Next one would be, we'd have this leg continuing to come forward, and this front leg continuing to come forwards. This would still be on the ground. This would still be on the ground too. This and this being in synchronicity on the opposite diagonals. Likewise, this angle and this angle being synchronized on opposite diagonals. The next drawing would be basically this same drawing but with the legs reversed. We'd have the back leg there, we'd have the front leg there. That will be touching down onto the ground at this point. That one would be there, and the front leg would be there. The next one we would have and again, we have this angle, this angle mirroring each other, and also this foot and thigh mirroring each other. We've got the foot here, which should be mirroring the front leg sides, and we'll just tweak that a little bit there. The next drawing would be the trailing legs lifting off and moving forwards. That would look like the trailing. This one is staying on the ground and the trailing back foot lifting off. We'd have that there. The trailing leg on the front side, the nearest side to us. That would look like, again, the diagonally opposite mirroring each other. This would be mirroring the opposite side here. Then the final one, we will have the back foot that's connected to the ground. The front foot connected to the ground from the opposite side, mirroring this angle. We'll put that in there. Then the front on this side would be starting to head forwards. The back foot would be mirroring this one. That one heading forward too. Then you just hit my bags of the start there and repeat. With a trot, it's the diagonally opposite leg switch mirror each other. Again, you still maintain this mirroring here as well. Next, we will move on to something a little speedier. 26. Locomotion - Canter and Gallop: When a dog canters, its front legs and back legs work together. You end up with something like this. Then you would get, say the front legs would be like this and the back legs like this too. It's just a different speed of running. It's faster than trotting. It's not as fast as a rotary gallop. There's a few things about a rotary gallop that are worth noting. One is that at a certain point all the feet are off the ground and underneath the body and it would be a much more folded position. You'd have all the feet under the body, actually keeping the forearm matching the scapula there. It's not synchronized one leg with another, it's a rotary gallop, which means that if, say, this is your dog facing forwards, the feet hit the ground either clockwise or anticlockwise, but in this fashion, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. It could be clockwise, could be anticlockwise. I guess it's a dog equivalent of being left and right-handed and fully for the limbs all spread out at the same time or very stretched out with nothing touching the floor, so everything's just up in the air for a moment. Same deal here, everything can be up in the air for a moment there as well. Other than that, there's something touching the ground. That will be the ground. A few other little poses for our doggy. We have the ground there. Again, remember this forearm and scapular and foot and thigh mirroring each other positionally. It's not 100 percent with these two, but it's close enough that you can use that as a pretty good guide. Let's see. This foot has got some pressure on it. Put some ears and a neck on this dog, why not? Maybe we got to stick some ears and a neck on that one too. Cantering, front legs and back legs operating, du du du. Rotary gallop is a du du du du du, rotating clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Watch dogs running, you can find plenty of footage of them running, and have some fun sketching some dogs in some running poses. Sometimes when you see still footage of dogs running, it looks very strange. It's good to scroll through a few, get a general feeling for how you like it, and you can draw legs in positions that are not 100 percent as you would photograph them, but they feel right. As long as you understand the general principle behind the running and the walking and the trotting, you can cobble together some nice poses that feel good and are fun to draw. 27. Locomotion - Loose Doodles: Here are a few scribbles I made to just illustrate the same principles. Just a little scribbly, sketchy fashion, giving them a little more organic dogness. This is just the scapular, and the upper arm, and the forearm. This is just reiterating the importance of how the tendon of the long head of the triceps where it keeps these two bones relative to each other fairly parallel. The calf muscle here with the tendon going to the heel does the same thing, operating along with this bone to keep the thigh and the foot more or less parallel as well. I can't emphasize that enough, always good to be aware of that. Many of times, you forget and you draw a dog and it looks a little weird. This is for when it's got weight on it anyway like when it's running or walking. If it's just lounging around and stretching itself out, you don't have to worry about this. But when it's got weight on it, then this operates to keep those elements parallel. Just enjoy playing with your shapes. Got your neck, your head, the flappy ears, and you can just play around and just keep readjusting things until they feel how you like them. After all, it's all about having fun, and getting better, and having fun getting better. 28. Some Things to Look Out For: Here's a useful thing I've noticed, which involves looking at a dog from a front 3/4 and a rear 3/4 point of view. It's very useful when you're quickly drawing lots of dogs, involves the back legs. I threw in this quick profile view just to show you that the angles between the thigh, the lower leg, the foot, there's a fair bit of angularity there. But when you're looking at a dog from a front 3/4 perspective, the leg on the side closest to you appears more or less in a straight line. Even though this is coming maybe towards you a little bit, this is going away from me a little bit, and this is also coming towards you a little bit, it's much more noticeable on the far side leg, like this. The opposite is true when you're looking at a dog in a rear 3/4 point of view. The leg nearest to us has all where you get to see better the angles that make up the thigh for the lower leg and the far away leg is the one that looks more straight. When you put all the muscles and everything onto the close leg, you get this nice dog leg thing where you've got that nice curve around here curve into the foot and that sharp bit on the heel, and then the curve at the back of the knee and the back of the leg there. Whereas the leg off in the distance there on the other side of the body has the look of a lumpy stick. The same thing is true of other animals like horses and stuff. That's the rear 3/4 view, you get the nice dog leg look on the leg closest to us, and then on the front 3/4 view that is the case with the far away leg on the far side of the body. We get that going on. Then the near leg is the one that's looking a little bit like a lumpy old stick. Just a useful thing, when you're drawing very quickly and just knocking in a bunch of dogs into a scene, a useful little trick to bear in mind. This is us looking at a cube directly, one thing I've noticed is that when you rotate the cube through 45 degrees, it gets a little wider, but it doesn't get massively wide. It doesn't get as wide as you might think it does. Some of this might be what your cube ends up looking like after rotating it through 45 degrees and if you didn't rotate it 45 degrees instead from here, you rotated it may be 20 degrees or something. It's just a little bit wider. This line would be coming in a little bit because it's moving towards us. This would be going out a little bit. But the overall effect is that this face here is a lot thinner than you might otherwise be inclined to draw it, and I have noticed in myself a tendency to overdo this. I've probably done it a bunch when I've been drawing dogs as cubes and everything. I try and stay aware of that and almost overcompensate in the other direction for it. But it's a fairly common pitfall. Just something that's useful to know. The widest distance that you will ever get from a cube is when it's rotated 45 degrees towards you, and I guess 45 degrees down, and you'll have something that looks a bit like that. Then the distance between any two diagonally opposite points will be the longest distance, so it could be between those two points. Well, maybe these two points. The point of this is to be careful when rotating things into a 3/4 view that you don't stretch them out too long. This one I've said it a bunch, and I'll say it a bunch more probably. This thigh angle and this foot angle, when there's any weight on the dog, keep those angles more or less parallel. Same goes for the shoulder blade and the lower leg. I've noticed that the shoulder blade has tendency to be a little more inclined in this direction, but not too much. They are substantially parallel, so bear that in mind. Another thing I've noticed I have a tendency to do quite a lot is make this too long, so be aware of that, probably a little too long there. Keep these more or less parallel, be aware of making that too long, and notice other mistakes that you may make that I may not make. There'll be mistakes for sure, but you want to make them, you want to notice them, and you want to be aware of them when you're drawing next time so that you can avoid them. I just like to point out the front end of a dog's rib cage really does get quite thin. Dogs are thin. I mean, they're thinner than you might think that they are when you actually start, so taking measurements and stuff. If this is a dog from above, the front of the rib cage is quite narrowed, and it allows for this shoulder area, the scapula, as in upper arm muscles to slap on the front there so that when you view it from the front view, this is the narrow front of the rib cage, you can divide this with, this is the widest part of the rib cage, but then you get these front legs. I'll draw them in a different color. Just slapped on there. You can think of them as big meat chops or something, just thrown on. Poking this up. But when you look at the dog from the front, so the chest, neck, throat, and all that occupies the middle section and the sides, a result of the bones and muscles of the front leg. Here's a quick side look at the lamb chop effect. I'll draw it in blue. Slap those on the front of there, pokes everything out. From the back, the widest part of the dog, as I've mentioned, is the mid thigh, leg bicep muscle which goes in here, it's quite wide. This is like one head wide, and the front end of the dog with the widest points are the widest part of the rib cage and the front of the shoulders where there's scapular bones connects with the upper arm bones. There's the widest points of a very narrow animal when viewed from above. 29. Fit It All In with Camera Height and Tilt: We're going to take a look at camera height and tilt and as it affects how we would lay out our drawings. The first thing we need are a few little beasts to populate their frame. The next thing we need is to decide on a camera height. We will start with the camera at the same height as the dogs heads. We can just draw a dotted line through there. That's the center. It would indicate the center of our frame. Let's see what that would look like. The center of our frame, we can indicate, and we can see that our dog heads are all on that center of frame. We can also see that the bottom of the first dot is chopped off. We can draw the dog heads and draw his neck, body, and then the bottom of him is chopped off. The next dog back, everything would be smaller because it's further back, but the head is still on the center line. There's dog Number 2 and its feet now make it into the bottom of the frame. dog Number 3, further back still, its head would be smaller, all of them would be smaller. They would be smaller in a frame. The horizon line would be exactly in the center of frame through the dogs' heads because that's the height of the camera, and it's pointing straight ahead. If we were to tilt the camera down a little bit, our horizon line would go up, and the dog heads would still be on the horizon line because the camera is at dog head height. It still gets smaller back in frame, you'd end up with something like that. Horizon, some, there we go. If we were to tilt the camera up a little bit, the horizon line would drop down in frame. The dog heads would still be on the horizon line, because the camera height is still at dog head level, we'd just lose our dog's head at the bottom of the frame. Possibly we'd get all of that. What if we lift our camera up, get it higher? Let's get our camera say, three dogs height. Now, if we would just have the camera pointing straight ahead, obviously, most of our dogs will just disappear at the bottom of frame. We need to angle our camera down. This would be the center, and this would be what our camera sees. What would that look like? The center of our frame is running through here. Our front dog, we're not even seeing too much of it, just the top of his head. None of it even makes it to the center of frame. That's all we would see of our front dog. Dog behind that one, its back seems to just about make it to the center of frame, and it's feet are in frame too, we can see here. We can get his feet in there. We're looking down on it. There's dog Number 2. Dog Number 3, his body is just slightly above center of frame. Everything fits in the frame. We could do that one here. The horizon line would be, let's say what are you? Three dogs high. Horizon line is going to be here. We're not even going to see the horizon line. This dog is three dogs down from the horizon line, so 1, 2, 3. This dog would be, if you were to draw it all the way to the bottom, you'd go 1, 2, 3, boom, that's where its feet would be. This dog, 1, 2, 3, that's its feet. That's how you figure that out. That's with the camera raised, and tilting down. Now, what if we're to lower our camera, and look at our dogs from, let's put the camera down, say around the dogs ankle height. We don't want to look straight ahead. We want to angle up a little bit. We will point our camera in this direction. We're going to be seeing that. Now we're angled up a little bit. What would that look like? First off, we can indicate the center of our frame, and we know that this dog is just about in frame, his head gets to here, his body, and then his feet. It's just about in our frame. We know that the camera is at the height of his ankles. We would draw the horizon line through his ankles. The next dog would be further back in frame, so it would be smaller. Because the camera is at the height of his ankles, we're going to draw that dog with his ankles crossing the horizon line. That would be smaller. We can see it all falls below the halfway line. That's where the second dog would go. The third dog would be halfway to the halfway point. We can draw him top of his head would be here, there is his body, and again, the horizon line crosses at his ankles. You just make sure that however far back you go, or however close you get, if you wanted to draw a dog really super close up, its ankles would be crossing the horizon line. If you wanted a dog really close, you couldn't draw its head in there unless it was looking down or something, having a sniff on the ground because its ankle would be crossing the horizon line. That's when the camera's down and tilted a little bit up. Put our sign there. That was just a quick look at the camera height and tilt with regards to arranging objects in a frame, and you can figure it out diagrammatically if you're just drawing something and you start running into problems. I've used this so many times when I'm figuring out storyboard frames, you start drawing a thing and then you start running out of space towards the top and you're like, "Oh no, I didn't tilt the camera up enough." This is just a really quick, I need to backup, do a quick diagram, figure out where I'm going to put everything and then just have at it again. But if you're aware of all this from the get-go, saves you a lot of time, lot of aggravation, and just makes life more efficient. 30. Some Visual Aids: Hi. No pencil in my hand, that's because I thought I'd show you a few little visual aids you could easily make for yourself. This is couple of little wooden blocks, got from a craft store. Put a couple of bits of painter's tape on this, so we always know which way is up because in the middle we have a piece of foam. I just chop the foam to shape using a razor blade, it's just regular upholstery foam getting cushion and stuff. I glued it to the wood with a wood contact adhesive. You just put a little bit on the foam, a little bit on the wood, let them both dry and then carefully put them together. Then I thought, well, I could make a nicer one. I made this one out of a ceramic like sculpting compound. This is basically a kind of clay that you can bake in the oven and it goes hard. This is the pelvic area of a dog and this represents the rib cage, so you can fold it, you wouldn't bend it that way because it can't do that, but you can fold it that way, you can bend it to the side, you can twist it a bit too, or you can twist it a lot actually. But, you anyway would want it twisted a bit. But, you can get this thing into all kinds of crazy dog poses like when the dog's scratching itself and stuff, so it bends forward, slings off to the side and tucks it's butt under this kind of thing. You can use this to explore how these fairly rigid shapes bend and twist and relative to each other. Another thing you can get your hands-on is a skull. This is a plastic skull, is 3D printed, you can just look online for those. This is a German Shepherd skull, but obviously, not German Shepherd skull size because it's been reproduced as a miniaturized version. But I put these rubber bands on because it makes it really useful when you're learning the shape to see the contours and the cross-section. You can see this is oval, this is hexagonal, this is pentagonal, this is more triangular. If you pop this off, you'll notice that the jaws articulate as well. Very handy. The next visual aid was the full skeleton. You can buy these plastic skeletons where you have a clear plastic outside of a dog, you put the skeleton inside. I just basically kept the skeleton part and didn't bother with all the rest. The legs of a dog can be thought of as a three part system, so 1, 2, 3 and 1, 2, 3. What keeps them from getting into a floppy old mess and holds them very stable is the introduction of a fourth part which goes here. On the front leg looks like this. That fourth part remaining more or less the same length as the second part holds the first and third parts parallel. This in the dog would be the long head of the triceps. As you can see, there's no way these two are now going to get massively out of alignment in terms of being parallel. Same thing goes with the back legs, we need a fourth part to hold the first and third part in parallel and that is provided by the calf muscle. As you can see, once again, it's very stable, move them around, these two remain parallel. This was all explained much better than I could explain it by Professor Dr. Martinez Fischer. You can watch a lecture of his online at least you can at the time of me making this. Is called Dogs in Motion and it's on YouTube, so definitely check that out, it's very interesting. Hopefully, these few visual aids will help you understand a few key points when it comes to drawing dogs and making that easier. 31. Life Drawing from Memory: This is an encouragement to draw from memory and to look carefully at things and then try and remember as much as you can and then draw it later. This is me playing with the neighbor's dog, throwing sticks for it and so forth. It has a tendency to like to jump up and slam you with it's paws a little bit. But nonetheless, I have made quite a large number of drawings where I just go look at it and then draw what I remember when I get back. The following drawings are basically my memory drawings of the neighbor's dog. I did most of them with permanent markers, which is interesting. You have to slow down and think a little harder before you put your marks down. Try and see what you are about to draw before you draw it. Whereas with a pencil you can throw in a few construction lines and figure your way into it. Just a different way of looking at it. These drawings were made over a few months, and I have put them in no particular order. You might bounce back and forth between puppy-ish and a little older looking. Drawing from life, a dog, rather than a person, you can have a person, strike a pose and hold it for a while. Whereas a dog is obviously just going to wander around doing its own thing. You have to quickly fix in your memory what it is that's interesting you about what it's doing. What I did here, I would go out into the back garden and look over the fence and the dog would be just doing whatever it does. I might throw it a treat to get it to do something else. Just watch it for a bit, run back inside, and then draw it. It's interesting because there's things that you don't remember when you get to them with your drawing. It's "Oh, how did that go? What was that?" You think, "Well, I'm going to make a decision for better or worse, I'm going to do this." Then you go back out and try and get the dog to repeat the action and look at it again, and it's, "Oh, okay. I was right this time about this but wrong about that." Then you'd go back inside and draw it again and you've learned a thing. I mean, that's the whole point of this process. That's why I don't use nice sketch books or anything fancy. I was drawing all of these on an old screenplay that I'd finished drawing storyboards for, and rather than throw it away, I just drew on the backside. Yeah, with a proper fancy sketchbook, I would tend to get precious and hold myself back from making mistakes, which is, if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning anything. Everything here is what I saw the neighbor's dog doing except for that scary barking, and also maybe this skydiving. 32. Well Done, and Thanks!: Thanks again for taking this course. I can't wait to see what you post and I'm around to answer questions and stuff. Feel free to start discussions and when I can I'll jump in, have a look and help out. I highly encourage you to take a deeper dive into perspective and anatomy if you feel that those are holding you back. Other than that, I just like to say, you can find me around the Internet here and there. Thanks again and have fun drawing.