Pet Portraits

This workbook turns the Pet Portraits course into drawing reps built on the same method: construct the animal head, lock the likeness from a photo, and render lifelike fur, eyes, and nose in coloured pencil or digitally. Each section maps to one course module and mixes hands-on drawing exercises, fill-in worksheets, and checklists. Work through it with a sketchbook or tablet, artist-grade coloured pencils or Procreate, and a stack of sharp, well-lit reference photos, and finish by carrying one real animal all the way from reference brief to a finished, recognizable, sellable portrait.

Drill the structural eye: finding the skull inside the fluff, comparing dog, cat, horse, and bird skulls, and placing eyes, ears, nose, and muzzle accurately before any rendering.

Take five reference photos, one dog, one cat, one horse, one rabbit, and one bird, and for each draw ONLY the underlying solid head in simple shapes: a sphere for the cranium plus a muzzle wedge or beak, with a vertical centerline, a horizontal eye line, and the ear set marked. Draw no fur or feather. This trains your eye to find the structure before you render a surface.

Collect references of one dolichocephalic (long, e.g. Collie or Siamese), one mesocephalic (medium, e.g. Labrador or shorthair cat), and one brachycephalic (flat-faced, e.g. Pug or Persian) dog or cat. Block each head in simple solids, labelling the stop, muzzle length, and eye placement, so you feel how differently each skull type is proportioned.

Print or load your chosen main subject and analyze its head structure before drawing. Fill in each field from the reference so the construction, not the fur, drives your proportions.

Practice judging and choosing references, transferring proportions accurately with a grid, and locking the eyes and expression that carry the likeness, then testing whether the drawing truly resembles the animal.

Gather six photos of pets, your own or from a stock site, and grade each against the six reference qualities, marking it usable or not and exactly why. Train yourself to reject weak references and recognize the qualities that make a photo worth drawing from.

Transfer the same reference twice, once entirely freehand by eye and once with a grid (finer over the eyes), then overlay both on the original. Seeing exactly where the freehand version drifted teaches you which relationships your eye gets wrong.

Before final detailing of your main subject, audit the likeness, especially the eyes, against the reference at high zoom, and record the result of each test.

Take a constructed, accurate drawing to a living surface: directional dark-to-light fur layering, the special cases of white coats, black coats, and feathers, and the wet eye and moist nose that bring a portrait to life.

Render three small fur swatches from references, a short smooth coat, a long flowing coat, and a wiry terrier coat, each built dark-to-light in directional layers. Comparing the three teaches you how stroke length, density, and direction must change to read as each coat type.

Render a small study of a pure-white animal using NO white pencil until a final highlight pass (build the form in cool greys, blues, and warm reflected light), and a study of a solid-black animal on toned paper, built up with lights rather than down with darks. This breaks the instinct to equate white fur with blank paper and black fur with solid black.

Render one animal eye and one nose as isolated studies at large scale, each treated as a wet, light-catching form with its catchlight and sheen, then compare to the reference at full zoom. Mastering these two small forms in isolation pays off in every portrait.

Execute and sell finished portraits: artist-grade coloured-pencil materials and patient layering, a non-destructive digital pipeline in Procreate or Photoshop, and the practical business of running a pet commission end to end.

Render the same small fur study twice with the same artist-grade pencils and ten-plus directional layers, once on smooth Bristol and once on toned sanded paper such as Pastelmat. Feeling how differently each surface grips and builds teaches you to choose paper deliberately for a coat type.

Paint the same animal twice digitally, once relying on a fur brush without planning direction or value, and once building it deliberately on separate dark, mid, and light value layers along the real growth flow. The stark difference proves the brush is only as good as the thinking behind it.

Set up a real or practice commission before you draw, capturing the reference brief, the scope, and the price so both you and the client are protected.