Drawing Dogs!

“Imagine that the first person to draw an animal was watched by someone else, and when that person saw the creature again, they would have seen it much more clearly.”

-David Hockney, A History of Pictures for Children

This bull in the Lascaux Cave in France is one of the earliest known drawings.  It is estimated to have been made around 15,000 BCE.  When we make pictures, we should look closely. The artist who painted a bull on the wall of this cave must have looked at the creature very carefully.

Diego Velázquez

Before we begin, I’d like to show you some paintings by an artist who loved to paint dogs. Diego Velázquez was a Spanish painter in the 1600’s.  He painted many portraits of royalty, but he also loved to paint their pets!  His dog paintings have personality and look and act like real dogs.  He must really studied them closely.

I like this sleepy dog from Velázquez’ famous painting, Las Meninas. He must be very gentle to let the boy rest his foot on him like that.

Here is another sleepy dog by Velázquez. The prince is named Balthasar Carlos. I very curious about the smaller dog. Why is he all the way over there? He’s barely in the picture! He is the one ready to hunt while the other dog is over there snoozing.
Do you think Diego Velázquez liked dogs? Do you think he had a dog? What do you think these two dogs are named?

Time to Draw!

Today, we are going to learn to draw dogs, but first we must take a careful look at this familiar animal.  Here is a drawing of a dog’s skeleton.  Looking at an animal’s skeleton helps us to understand how it is built, which will help us to build our drawings. Take a look at the legs. Do you see how the dog is actually always standing on tippy toes?! 

We don’t need to draw the entire skeleton under our drawing.  Just finding the most important shapes and where they go will be enough to start with.  Get your paper and pencil and copy the pink shapes.

The next step is to use a pen to draw the rest of your dog on top of your pencil skeleton.  All I had to do for the Shih Tzu was cover my skeleton in fur! If you want, you can adjust the placement of your skeleton shapes to make your dog doing different things.  Think about Diego Velázquez and how he brought his dogs to life by putting them in poses he had observed real dogs doing!

Here are some more tips on drawings dogs.

Here are a few dog photos for inspiration.