Preparing for Drawing and Painting Animals From Life at Yorkshire Wildlife Park
Greetings! I am back from a lovely day out sketching and studying animals from life at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. The weather held up, and I managed to even get a painting in! After I started writing this I realised I was creating quite the lengthy post, so I have split the experience into two parts. This post will cover the preparation for the sketching adventure, and an exercise for drawing moving animals you can do at home. My next post will be about what I created while I was there, and also a story or two about how you never really know what will happen when you’re drawing outside and in the public! Come along with me as we take a look at the first stages of me prepping for drawing and painting animals from life.
A sleeping polar bear at Project Polar in Yorkshire Wildlife Park.
A whole new set of skills
Drawing and painting moving animals while outside takes a whole other set of skills than you will be used to from the comfort of a desk. It does utilise a lot of skills you build at the desk such as anatomy, gesture, colour theory, lighting and values, etc. but asks for you to build new skills on top of those too. Animals move around without warning, and can wander off entirely at a moments notice. The lighting changes constantly, along with the weather. At least in early-Spring England, you never know when a surprise rain shower may arrive! People can stare at you as they pass, or even approach you and strike up a conversation. A quiet location you set up in can become crowded and loud at a moments notice. The list goes on.
So how can we prepare for any of this beforehand? While a great deal of the skill building will come from practical experience outside, I have found that there are things I can do beforehand to provide me a foundation for success - and to help determine what that “success” even is.
For me, that comes down to preparing three things: my art supplies, my relevant skills and fundamentals, and my mind.
What is success to you?
First actually comes the mind part. Setting expectations in advance, and allowing for some flexibility with them, helps me to figure out what to prepare and how tackle what may arise on the day. Building any skill inevitably requires me to face the uncomfortable at some point, but only through continuing through all aspects of creating and learning will I actually grow. To me success is continuing down that path, and learning how to do so along the way. These things may sound airy-fairy to some people, but surprisingly helps set the groundwork for the practical aspects.
So how did I apply this to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park trip? I set the main expectation for what my “success” would be: learning by studying living animals, regardless of how the studies would look. Success would be picking up the pencil or brush, and moving it on paper for the purpose of studying. The flexible expectations were to do some dry-media sketching from life, and to do at least one painting from life. Notice how those are very broad and vague? I did not, and could not, know what the weather or conditions would be like to be able to plan the type or length of painting I would do. A part of making my expectations realistic was anticipating that, and not setting too specific of a goal like creating a 7 by 10 inch hour-long painting. I really wanted to paint this time, even if it would only be a tiny and fast brush scribble between pouring rain.
I also narrowed down the animals I wanted to study to big cats and polar bears. Big cats are a subject I love, and the polar bears at the Project Polar sanctuary were an opportunity unique to Yorkshire Wildlife Park that I did not want to miss. While narrowing down subject matter in advance is not entirely necessary, doing so helped me arrive with focus and reduced potential choice overwhelm in what to draw. Another mind-thing and part of my “learning how to move down the path of studying art”. I have learnt that I can easily become frozen by too many choices, so it is something I prepare for in advance. That’s not to say I couldn’t draw something else on the day if I felt inspired to do so, but having a plan to go in with gave me a springboard to jump from.
Figuring out what prevents you from creating and studying what you want, and then finding ways to help with that is very individual to each person. For some artists, limitation may even have the opposite effect on them by feeling too creatively stifling. Learning about myself and what I need as an individual has been continuously helpful in both my creative practice and self-study, and ensures that I keep moving forward with less resistance.
Testing my watercolour travel palette colour selection with a leopard line and wash sketch.
Creating an art kit
Mind set, loose expectations formed. It was time to put together the art kit and then practice some skills. By setting those goals first, and by knowing myself and what I need, I had a pretty easy time creating a kit. I wanted to have dry-media options for the sketching goal, painting options for the painting goal, but then make the kit as narrowed down as possible to reduce that pesky choice-paralysis.
For the dry-media I selected one of my current sketchbooks, a yellow Royal Talens Art Creation, and paired it with a 4in1 BIC ballpoint pen, 0.5 HB and 0.7mm 2B mechanical pencils, and a kneadable eraser. The HB pencil would primarily be for sketching a potential painting study, while the 2B would be primarily for animal gesture and figure drawing. The ballpoint pen served as a dual-purpose option, being something I love for both dry-media and wet-media sketching. When selecting a small range of supplies for studying, it is important to me that they are tools I am comfortable with and love using. I want to set up a path of least resistance to creating, so that in the moment I am not struggling with supplies on top of handling all the random chaos awaiting me outside too.
The watercolour kit was a little more involved, due to the nature of the medium. For a palette I chose my micro portable painter with the six colour selection I talked about last week. I notoriously do not have a fondness for water-brushes (love the convenience, hate how they feel to use), and that also showed in this kit. I selected the large round ProArte Midas Touch travel brush, along with the tiny round brush that came with my first set of student colours by Cotman. It’s point is a little warn now, but I still find use in the old thing! All of those went into an art bag (I got mine from Denise Soden of In Liquid Color) along with some clips, a healthy supply of paper towels, and my painting surfaces. My new accordion style sketchbook with hot press paper by Etchr, and a 5 by 7 inch cold press watercolour block by Baohong Academy. For the water I brought a small lidded metal water pot, and kept that in a separate "wet bag” for the used paper towels.
My watercolour painting bag on the day I visited Yorkshire Wildlife Park.
An exercise to prepare for drawing moving animals
In the weeks before the outing I tested the supplies I wanted to bring with me, and the colour selection of my watercolour palette, to see if they met my goals. When I did these tests I also warmed myself up for some of the painting and drawing conditions I would face at the park. Some of the tests I shared with you in previous blog posts such as the painting of the polar bear Hamish scratching his neck, and the leopard line and wash sketch.
Today though I want to talk about a particularly helpful exercise you can do from the comfort of your desk, or bed I am not judging, to start building the skill of drawing moving animals. This is using un-paused videos as drawing reference. It is integral to the exercise that the videos are not paused, or it defeats the point of drawing moving animals.
The easiest form of this is to use a short video on a loop, somewhere between 30 to 120 seconds. This allows you to repeatedly see an animal move into the same positions. For a more complex approach I recommend drawing along to documentaries or even livestreams. The streaming website Twitch has a category specifically for animal livestreams. There are also several streams on YouTube of zoo and national park live cams. I particularly recommend the annual bear livestreams in Alaska during the salmon season, and the old recordings of them available year-round such as the Brooke Falls Katmai National Park Highlights. The website Explore.org also has a livecam section for various animals and habitats.
Before you even put pen to paper, I suggest that you first take a few minutes to observe the animal. Notice how it moves, the anatomy, the simple shapes that form it. Notice any patterns in movement or poses.
As for the type of drawing you do while studying from videos, that is up to you and your goals. Here are a few ideas to get you going though:
fill a page with lines of action
quick gesture studies, as if you were doing 10 to 30 second human gestures
capture the gesture of a pose, then use your knowledge of simple shapes and anatomy to build the animal on top of the gesture while referencing the moving animal
fill a page with studies of individual elements (portraits, legs, paws, etc.)
Upon attempting to study from videos you may quickly come face to face with how drawing moving animals is a skill of its own, despite your skills at drawing animals in general. For some this may be uncomfortable to face, for others it may be exciting. A whole new skill you’re fresh in is a whole new world of failures, insights and growth. As long as you keep picking up the pencil or brush, that is.
To prepare for painting polar bears from life I did a study using a looped video of a moving polar bear that came with the course “Drawing with Life, Energy, and Story” by David Colman. I used the supplies I planned to take with me: the 0.5mm HB pencil, the large travel brush, the portable painter micro, and the accordion-style sketchbook. Unlike the previous polar bear painting, I did try to keep time in mind more with this study and aimed for roughly 30 minutes. I admittedly overshot that by 5 or so minutes!
The pencil and watercolour study of a polar bear using looped video footage.
The study gave me insight into the range of local colour I was likely to see, and how I could mix them using my limited palette. It also further cemented the idea of creating a more detailed pencil sketch of the subject then allowing the background to loosen up as a way to sketch more quickly yet effectively. From an art kit stand-point I was also left satisfied about the tool selection I had chosen.
Finding a pose to focus on was the hardest part of the exercise, especially since previously to this I usually only do quick animal gesture drawing from moving videos. A longer pose - a painted one at that - felt more final and that impacted my initial decision making. Perhaps another form of choice paralysis popping up? I watched the loop a few times, observing the movement of the bear, before settling on a moment where the bear stops mid-walk and looks off to the side. It held the pose for a second or so, which was just long enough that it was comfortable to re-observe through each loop.
Alongside this exercise, I do still recommend additionally studying animal anatomy and observational drawing or painting. While studying moving animals is its own skill, it does still utilise a variety of fundamentals and anatomy knowledge. A benefit to selecting one or two animals of interest for a trip helps you narrow down the anatomy you may want to brush up on beforehand. For a more general approach, exercises such as constructing animals from simple forms can be a helpful skill to build as it can be applied to a variety of animals in practice.
That’s all for now, lovelies. Check in again for the next post where I’ll share all about the highs and lows of the big day itself. For now though, happy drawing!
