The Weatherly Guide to Drawing Animals is a great book for learning to sketch animals. It’s not a book that will show you how to do finished illustrations but shows you how to capture their movement in a gesture drawing and how to build a drawing through basic forms. It covers a wide number of animals and gives you techniques that you can apply to animals that aren’t specifically covered in the book.

Joe Weatherly and I were both students of the great Glenn Vilppu and you can see some similarities in our techniques.  I particularly like this book for it’s emphasis on constructing the animals from three dimensional shapes. It’s excellent at showing how to break down different subjects into simple forms and it’s rewarding to challenge yourself to figure out the best forms to use on an unfamiliar subject. And because there are so many different animals to draw, they’re a great way to practice this skill.

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