Welcome Spring: A step by Step Squirrel drawing in Graphite

 

  Well the second Corona Easter has come and gone and somehow I am just getting the chance to sit down and write a blog post now. Sorry about the long silence on my part, perfectly healthy, just busy with the white noise of having everyone home most of the time. 

   As many of you know I participate in an online scientific illustration course about 2 times per year as it offers a great opportunity to practice specific time consuming techniques. If you are curious about the course I have written about it in a previous blog post.

   This time around I decided to render a squirrel as it seemed appropriate to choose a small animal to hail the first signs of spring. Doing the gesture studies was an absolute delight. I had forgotten how funny and flexible these little creatures are.

   I didn't take as many pictures of the early stages of this illustration as I usually do but if you are curious about starting such a rendering I recommend my previous step by step posts which will offer more process pictures.

At the time of my first photo I had rendered the fur on the body of the animal and had added a bit of definition to the face.

 

   My reference photo portraited a squirrel standing in the grass and as I result I spent an entire evening researching and sketching feet. I finally managed to create what I believe to be accurate feet and was able to move on.

    I began the tail with long rough strokes that indicated the direction of hair growth. Once this was done I began adding layers of fine pencil strokes to create a silky look to the fur.

 

   This image is just about 2 hours from completion. You can see that the fur has been evenly rendered over the majority of the body. Since these projects are so time intensive, and drawing fur relatively mindless, I like to watch something. As I have seen most of what interests me on Netflix during the pandemic I am reaching backward to the delights of older series. My current favorite is the saint. which will be followed by the James Bond films, I hope...

   And here he is, finished at last. I am always a bit nervous adding whiskers but they seem to make all the difference.

 I will try to put up a few more posts soon and I hope you are inspired to create a beautiful animal drawing, or to simply enjoy nature in the way you like best.

Other Posts you may enjoy:

Step by Step Racoon

Fox Kit 

 

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