The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals Paperback – April 8, 2003

This book is light on text and large on illustrations. But the text that exists is meant to be read, not just skimmed!This is NOT a book for beginners. You really need to already have fundamental drawing skills mastered before tackling the exercises in this book.One thing Joe Weatherly stresses is that there is no 'magic wand' or short cuts. You get better at drawing by drawing! Always carry a sketchbook with you and draw from life. If you don't have animals handy, draw people. If you don't have people or animals handy, draw landscapes. They are all built from similar organic shapes.Include multiple sketches per page. And sketch in ink, rather than pencil. If you use pencil, you will spend half of your time erasing and redrawing! Sketching in ink forces you to really look at what you're drawing before you put a line to paper. Because of this, your drawings will be more accurate. (They will look like crap when you first start, but after a week or so, you will see a definite improvement as you adjust to working in ink.)I have been carrying a sketchbook around with me for 2 months now and I always have a couple of pens on me. I sketch people in restaurants, malls, parks, on street corners, in WalMart, wherever I can sit and sketch. Because I'm dealing with people in motion, I focus on gesture drawings that are done in 30 to 60 seconds. These gesture drawings capture a pose, clothing style, or hair style.After all, even at the zoo, animals are usually in motion and they don't stop and pose. You will fill a page or two with gesture drawings, do a few studies of feet and paws and faces and distinctive fur or feather features, and base your finished drawing off of these gesture drawings and pictorial notes.Mr. Weatherly stresses drawing from life, NOT photos. Photos will result in flat drawings and paintings. Drawing from life gives depth to your drawings and paintings. Photos are good a reference for animal marking patterns or a basic pose, but not to draw from.Since Mr. Weatherly is the guy Dreamworks and Disney hires to train their artists how to draw animals, he knows his stuff. He guides you through approaches to gesture drawings, how to observe animals, common shapes used in most animals, using contour lines to create depth, basics of anatomy, and much much more. Joe Weatherly has spent over 25 years walking the path ahead of you. His animal drawings and paintings are known around the world. And this book is the map he has created so you can follow in his footsteps.You will spend several months mastering the exercises and skills in the first half of the book before moving on to the second half of the book. Again, there is no magic wand, just the pen in your hand and the paper in your sketchbook. If you want to learn to draw animals, draw, draw, draw, and draw some more!Depending on your skill level, expect to spend six months to a year (maybe more) working through this book. Expect to draw daily. Expect a museum trip or two to draw animal skeletons and create your own library of anatomy reference sketches. Visit stables, dairies, kennels and zoos. Drawing people helps you draw animals and vice versa. Draw from life. Draw from your imagination. Draw from your gesture drawings and reference sketches. Draw, draw, draw, draw, draw!Did you think this was going to be easy??? There is no magic wand!

Joe is my professor and this book is so informative and it gives a very good step by step on where to start. I wasn’t sure how to go about it when the animals are constantly moving, but this book is so much help!

This one was recommended to me by a fellow Watts Atelier student.Once you understand the underlying construction of animals, you can draw anything. This book is not a step-by-step guide to drawing all your favourite animals - there are no hacks, no shortcuts applied only to each individual animal, neither is it meant to be a reference book. It's a guide on how to understand animal anatomy and draw any animal. If you're studying art seriously, this book is the only one you'll need for animal drawing outside of reference material.Weatherly's book is like studying the Loomis or Reilly or Asaro methods, but for animals. You start with gesture, then move on to the underlying anatomy so that you know what the forms are wrapping around, and then you layer value information over that.Of course it would help if you already have the drawing fundamentals covered: values, edges, etc.Obviously, this is still just the start. You'll have to do master studies from other artists that you'd like to emulate and draw from reference before you can invent an animal from scratch. That's just self-explanatory - to all the other people who gave this a bad review: you have to actually do the work.Comment on packaging: this is my first Amazon purchase and, despite being packed in a simple padded envelope, the book's corners are neatly intact. Well done!

This book actually has drawings on how to break down the animals body it shows you how to draw the shapes and very clear instruction not so many words which helps it's more showing you how to do it by doing the drawings like he did. It's a great book I would recommend it to people who don't know how to draw animals it shows the skeletal system and also different poses.

I was taking the author’s course online at New Master Academy and liked it, so I figured I would grab his book. While I know there are a lot of animals in the world to cover, and the author does a good job covering important ones, I’m a bit disappointed that there’s minimal focus on the MOST common ones (cats and dogs). The cat section is mostly big cats which aren’t the same as domestic ones (I know the author has a book dedicated to them, but kinda lame less focus on this book). Also, the dogs section leaves a lot to be desired -specifically around constructing the face/head. A difficult subject imo is dogs with their mouths open, tongue lolling, and the author has zero reference images for this. Almost every dog has their mouth shut.These domestic annimals are the most common animals in most artists’ lives, and ones they have most live-reference access to (which the author suggests drawing from), but the author chooses to neglect them a lot in the book.

Beautifully balanced between step by step, useful tips, theory and great illustrations, I will order everything I can from Wheaterly

This book teaches you a process for drawing animals that allows you to evolve into a fundamentally better animal draftsperson. You certainly can learn by "following along" but this book is so much more than the way to many quick formulaic books out there. It is not aimed at children, but at the same type of audience that might study figure drawing from life, which is heavily promoted in this book.While you will immediately find reward when you start using it, the book is really aimed at helping you to build a foundation for dealing with the not so cooperative world of drawing mammals. You should plan to work with it in rounds in a sort of iterative style. It will be a goto book for years to come.