Drawing Challenge #Day 7

Day 7’s challenge had simple instructions – draw any subject you are passionate about. However, the challenge was not that easy to complete,

I thought about it a little and decided to draw my pet dog, Cheeku. As of now, although I’m fairly decent at drawing after looking at an existing drawing or photo (in other words copying), I’m not that good at creating an original drawing by looking at a live subject.

One problem is that my proportions go for a toss. In inanimate subjects, I can still measure and determine a suitable scale to draw. But when drawing live subjects, especially drawing someone who can maintain a pose only in Sleep mode, determining proportions is tough.

Another problem is I am yet to learn about lighting, so I don’t have much of an idea about what to highlight, what to shade, and so on.

Luckily for me, I found a great step-by-step tutorial on drawing a dog’s face and one of the dog faces they were teaching to draw resembled Cheeku a lot. The tutorial gave me a good idea about the proportion of a dog’s face, and how to proceed after starting with a simple oval and rectangle. It was quite easy to follow and I came up with this:

This is quite like Cheeku, except for the ears. Cheeku’s ears stick out most of the time…when he folds them, he folds them backwards not downwards. But other than that, most of my friends who saw this agreed that it looked quite like Cheeku.

I’ll make another attempt soon to correct the ears.

Published by Leena T Pandey

I have been reading voraciously since the age of five when I first discovered the joys of reading. I would lap up anything in print. Unrolling an emptied newspaper cone with one hand, stuffing roasted peanuts in my mouth with the other, all the while devouring the printed content on the cone with my eyes, was one of my first experiences in hedonistic pleasure. In fact, sometimes I feel that I am on an adventurous journey through the secret dreamworld of other people's imaginations, interspersed with occasional visits to my own life to attend events like graduation, first job, marriage, and so on. As a true-blue reader, I think I am uniquely qualified to comment on and critique other people's works of labour. I can tell exactly what puts the average reader to sleep, what sets their pulse racing, and what has them salivating for more. Write to me at leenatpandey@gmail.com. View more posts