Improve Your Animal Art | 10 Tips for Painting Animals

I've been painting wildlife for about 7 or 8 years now and my biggest goal was to be able to add realism and create life in each of my paintings and I'm going to share with you 10 tips that I've picked up along the way to help you with your artistic journey. So the first thing to do is decide what kind of artwork you're trying to create. Is it going to be something that is a very fast piece and very stylised and loose or it's something that you want to add a lot of detail in, it's going to be slow and methodical. So you need to think about the media and the techniques that you're using. Is it going to be paint? Is it going to be charcoal, graphite, coloured pencils? What surface are you going to be painting on or drawing on? Is it going to be smooth? Is it going to be rough? Is it going to be textured? Is it going to be canvas, wood or paper? These are all decisions that you have to make before you start the painting process because they will influence the style and the type of painting that you create. Tip number two is choosing a good reference photo. This is especially important if you are looking to create a realistic piece. You cannot get realism without studying real life, without studying photographs. It's just too difficult. There's just too many little details that we don't see, too many nuances that we aren't aware of that we need to use those reference photos to study. You can use those references, they could be videos, so they could be used to study movements and anatomy and general structures. Or you can use those reference photos to study colour and light and directions of fur. For me, the best sources for reference photos that I've found are Pixabay, Unsplash and wildlifereferencephotos.com. I'll put links to all of those in the description below. Tip number three is your colours. This is probably the most important tip. You cannot achieve realism, other than if you're painting black and white obviously, but you cannot achieve realism with colours unless you get those colours right. And for me, in some paintings, getting those colours right is more important than actually adding all those tiny details. So make sure you study your reference photo closely and you make a list or a little palette of all of the colours that you need. This could be done by hand, by doing little colour swatches, or it could be done on a computer using Photoshop or Microsoft PowerPoint or an iPad using Procreate. Tip number four is creating an accurate sketch. Take the time to get your proportions correct. Too many times I've seen artists come to me with their pictures and say, how could I improve this? And they've got their colours right, they've got their details right, they've got their lighting right, but the thing that ruins the piece for them is just not getting those proportions right. And it's just a case of taking the time to double check everything against your reference photo. If something doesn't look in the right place, change it. If you really need to, you could always trace the image. If it's just your painting skills that you're trying to practice and trying to develop, then tracing is fine. If you're trying to develop your drawing skills and your freehand drawing ability, then I wouldn't recommend tracing because you're not actually learning anything. And one final tip with your under drawings and your sketches, don't make the lines too dark. You do not want them to be visible in the final piece. Tip number five is blocking the basic shapes first. Don't try to jump in with the details straight away. Look for the basic structures that make up the highlights and the shadows, the light areas and the dark areas and block those in first. It will just make establishing the form and the structure of the face much easier later on in the painting process. Don't be afraid to start very dark with this step either. Having those dark values in at the start allows us to adjust those values later on in the painting. And having those dark values allows us to really, really intensify the shadows and really add form to the piece. Six is your shading techniques and your transitions between shapes. Most photos that you get and most animals and things that we see in real life aren't completely sharp all the way across the image or their structure. There are areas that are soft and there are areas that have hard, sharp edges. You do not want to create a painting that is just full of sharp, tiny little details. You want to be able to have a mix of the soft, blended areas and the hard edges. So I find the best way to create soft, blended edges in areas is by layering, doing very thin washes of colour and building up those washes of colour to create subtle transitions between shapes. The next one is some basic tips on painting fur and feathers, which are in most animals that we paint or draw. I've got much more in-depth tutorials on painting fur and feathers on my Patreon page and the other videos, so make sure to check those out. Speaking of Patreon, I thought I'd use this video to announce the winner of my A3 print giveaway. This is for everyone that subscribed to the Studio Wildlife Patreon page as a Tiger supporter. So thank you so much and here's the winner! The basics are quite simple. The first and most important is painting clumps of hair rather than each individual strand. If you can get those big groupings right, it will just look more solid and a much better and more realistic piece because you wouldn't be able to see all those individual details in real life. Next is working layers. Build up those layers of fur just like you would see in real life, making sure to leave gaps between each strand that you're putting down so that those layers show up in the final piece and it gives that impression of 3D layered textured fur. This process also applies for the feathers. Then finally, fur and feathers don't always fall in the same direction. They're not combed completely flat and straight. So make sure to vary the direction or the curvature of those fur strands or those feather strands with each stroke that you put down. The more variation you have, the more interesting the picture is going to look. Next is the background and don't save the background until last and don't paint the background completely at the start. You want to have a mix of painting the background and your foreground subject because you want to incorporate some of those background colours into the animal and some of those animal colours into the background just to tie those areas of the piece together. Adding a background to your pictures gives an environment to the creature that you are trying to create. It shows that they live somewhere and that they're alive. These don't have to be super photorealistic backgrounds. They could be soft blurry backgrounds, they could be bouquet backgrounds, they could be foliage backgrounds, they could be complementary colour backgrounds. They just have to be something that is not going to draw the attention away from your main subject but complement it and give it somewhere to live to show that it is a living creature and it's not just floating around on the page randomly. If you're unsure of what background you could do, you could try photoshopping some backgrounds or using other photo editing software to try a variety of backgrounds that might work on your picture. Tip number nine is don't rush. Take your time with each individual section of the painting. I know when I was starting out, one of the things that I tended to do was paint the eyes and the nose and the face first. I would get really stuck into the details and really stuck into that part of the painting process and then when it came to the rest of the body or the less sort of important areas in my eyes, I just didn't take the time to paint these as well and it all just looked a little bit rushed and a little bit out of place. So take the time with each section of your painting to make it as good as it can be. One little thing that I like to do with this is paint the most boring sections first. This allows me to take time with these sections. I know I'm just starting out, so it's going to take time to get perfect, whereas starting with the face, I just want to sort of rush those sections just to get the piece finished. And then finally, tip number ten, and possibly the most important tip, is save the details until last. Don't just get stuck in with those details straight away. Not all areas of the fur are super sharp, they are not all in focus, so we don't need to add those details, but also we don't want to be wasting time adding details that we don't need. It's always a good idea to step away from the picture that you are creating and actually have a look and see if the marks that you are making are having any impact. What I tend to find with a lot of my pieces is that I work really, really close to that canvas and I'm looking at tiny individual sections of that picture rather than looking at it as a whole. And what that means is I'm just adding tiny little strokes of detail that are not needed and do not contribute to that picture. And it is one of the biggest things that I struggle with as an artist and I want to adjust in my work to one, improve efficiency, but two, it will also make the pictures look better because you don't need to go super sharp and super detailed in every aspect. Just the areas where you want the viewer to look and pay the most attention to. If you want to see more information about painting fur, why not check out this video about the do's and don'ts of how to paint fur. I hope you've enjoyed the video, if you have, please don't forget to give us a like and subscribe to the channel and why not check out the Patreon page. Thanks for watching!