The Art of Animal Drawing: Construction, Action Analysis, Caricature (Dover Art Instruction)

A wonderful resource for any artist interested in drawing some well-known animals; such as, horses or dogs. The sketching by Hultgren is phenomenal. This is NOT a book for beginning artist. If you are looking for a drawing book that gives you the step-by-step instructions using circles, triangles, and lines, you will not find that in this book. Other books are available that will give you this type of instruction. Hultgren comes more from the viewpoint that you already have a fundamental understanding on how to draw. He does offer tips on drawing animals, but it is more advanced than draw three circles, then connect this circle to this circle. He speaks more of the specific elements of different animals; such as, verbally instructing you to divide the animal into three parts - forequarters, belly, and rear - and drawing a dorsal line between these parts. He also provides a section on mood and feeling that I found interesting and personally helpful. Furthermore, sections on the use of line, action analysis, and brush technique are included. Now to get down to the specific animals Hultgren covers. For me the selection worked well, but it is not all encompassing. It couldn't possibly be, or else you wouldn't even be able to pick up the darn book. He offers detailed instruction on the Horse Family, Deer Family, the Cat Family, and the Bear Family. These are the most detailed sections of the book offering instruction drawing the skeletal and muscular structure of the animal. These sections also provide instruction on action, motion, specific body parts, and types of the animal. For instance, the lioness or the draft horse. The other chapters of the book feature cows and bulls, giraffes, camels, gorillas, pigs, dogs, foxes, kangaroos, rabbits, squirrels, and elephants are not as detailed and do not offer instruction on muscular drawing. Additionally, each animal section offers a short introduction to caricature from 1/2 page to a maximum of 2 pages. I personally enjoyed looking at the caricatures. Not all of them were "typical" cartoon drawing. The final chapter in the book covers composition in animal grouping. It gives the artist the fundamental principals behind animal grouping composition. This book is one of my favorites because it has really challenged my drawing abilities. I highly recommend this as a resource to those who have a fundamental understanding of drawing. For those of you starting out in drawing, I would recommend you find another resource first before pursuing this book.

Dover strikes gold again with their comprehensive animal drawing book, a must-have for aspiring artists and seasoned illustrators alike. This gem provides invaluable insights into capturing wildlife from every conceivable angle, fostering a deep understanding of anatomy and movement. While it demands diligent practice, the payoff is immense as techniques become second nature. A prized addition to any artist's library, this reference book not only enhances personal skills but also serves as an excellent teaching resource. For lovers of fine instructionals, Dover delivers once more.

This book has a lot of helpful hints in there for drawing animals, principles that are equally valid in drawing people. Concepts for organizing and comprehending shapes, and creating flow in your figures. It's also got some great compositional tips to help you make more interesting shapes and structure with your drawings. It's not an anatomy book. It's more about structure and movement, which are really important things to know in drawing, cartooning and animation. I was already a veteran professional illustrator and comic book artist when I bought this and I learned some new things and had good reminders of others. It's always good to keep learning new things and revisiting the basics from different points of view.

Our daughter is working hard to become a math/science focused teacher for elementary and middle-school age students, and has been doing very well in the classroom and in the field. However... the girl just could not draw at all -- not even stick figures -- and she really wanted to learn how to improve her ability to draw so that she might be able to use those skills to help make points in the classroom. That's an admirable goal; she is trying to do everything she can to help improve her ability to teach. The pictorial materials in this book began to help her visualize how animal drawings should be conceived, as a build from detailed understanding of the animal itself. By looking through them and then tracing over the drawings, she gained better understanding (and now at least her cats look like cats and not alligators...). Combined with a few other instructional books like Fast Sketching ( Fast Sketching Techniques: Capture the Fundamental Essence of Elusive Subjects ) and Drawing Realistic Faces ( Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces ), she really has come a long way in the last year. Highly recommended as part of a learning program.

Art books, and specifically "How to draw ___" books can be a little hit and miss in my experience, but this one was definitely a hit! It doesn't have much by way of written instruction, but the sketches were probably more useful to me than written instructions would have been, they're broken down in a way that's relatively easy to understand and reconstruct, so you can use the same techniques to build your own drawings. Some sketches include basic skeletal structure and anatomy, but only the parts that you really need to be able to understand what you're drawing and how it works, it doesn't go into painstaking detail. I really like how this artist understands the gestures of the animals he draws, and is able to capture the idea of the animal, the characteristics that identify each animal when we see it. I also liked the tips on composition and lines of movement. Definitely a solid, understandable book with a good variety of examples.

Pictures are worth a thousand words. I don’t need to be told beforehand, or as I’m looking through the pages, that this guide was written and drawn by someone with a background in animation. The animals drawn here are full of life and look like they want to leap across and out of the pages. Examples and techniques emphasize realistically rendered animals, though there’s the occasional page demonstrating how to draw caricatures, which look more like what you’d expect from Disney cartoons. In my opinion this guide is not for beginners, but rather for those who already have a grasp of the foundations of proportion, form, and rendering, and are looking for ways to instill more life, fluidity, and dynamics into animal drawings. There’s no step by step handholding or detailed tutorials on the basics of setting up and building on a drawing. The author assumes you already know most of that. I was a lapsed artist who used this book as motivation to get back into animal drawing. I recommend it for intermediate-advanced artists who want to take animal illustration further.

What a deal !! If I was still teaching art, I would have bought a class set. Great for beginners, but with enough info for anyone wanting to make their drawings more interesting & lifelike. There are 130 pages packed with basic shapes, action poses, caricature, & perspective. The the perspective drawings show front, back, & side views. They are very helpful. There are over 20 pages on horses & zebras & 20 pages on the cat family. He also includes deer, rabbits, squirrels, elephants, bears, pigs, camels, giraffes, cows & bulls, kangaroos, & gorillas. My only disappointment was there were only about 11 pages on dogs & foxes & no pages on wolves. Very pleased with this book !

Do I even need to say how awesome this is? Every artist should learn a little from the incredible drawings Hultgren has given us in this book. It's very affordable, but even the library or book store did not have this. Though you could possibly find this free, it's still a great gift to have and study from as an artist that has learned from his drawings since a very young age, and still to this day is learning new things from looking in this. ^_^ I should add though that this book is not the step by step most beginning artists are familiar with and often like a lot more. But it's still great reference for animal drawers/animators!

Great book for for all the art enthusiasts.

Me gustó mucho el contenido de este libro, este es un libro de dibujo, abarca linea de acción, construcción y movimiento.Es para mejorar tu manera de dibujar, no es un libro de anatomia, más bien te da tips en como dibujar animales cuadrúpedos, y simios, lamentable no abarca pájaros, pero el contenido que tiene es excelente, y Ken Hultgren explica muy bien, con un lenguaje práctico.

Auch wenn es 20 Jahre alt ist, dieses Buch ist ein wahrer Schatz. Es schärft den Blick und hilft, wo man nicht weiter weiß. Die Illustrationen sind so schön anzusehen, fast jedes behandelte Tier wird zusätzlich als "Karikatur" (ich würde eher sagen Cartoon) gezeigt. Was mir in dem Buch sehr fehlt sind Vögel, insbesondere Papageien. Ich würde es aber nicht wagen, deswegen einen Punkt abzuziehen. Dafür ist das Gesamtwerk einfach zu gut.

Excelente livro, excelente ilustrações, desde a caricatura ao realismo. A entrega foi realizada com um dia do atraso do previsto. Também demora um pouco a chegar, pois pedi dia 05 de maio, e recebi hoje, dia 30 de maio.

They give you pretty good tips and show you how to analyze figures in order to get decent proportions and movement fluency. It doesn't have many examples of different kinds of animals though.