Learn How to Draw a Puppy Digitally!

We all love puppies! As such, learning how to draw a puppy convincingly is something we would love to do because it's a satisfying feeling!

The tips and techniques featured here will rely on just a few digital art tools to draw a puppy. There will be nothing fancy as you will be basing the entire drawing on your first few gesture sketches!

By this time, you should already be very good with gesture and contour drawings as there is no other method more effective to get the ball rolling artistically.

Like all subjects, you must first learn its form. While you do not need to go into super amounts of details, you should at least have a general sense of your subject’s shape.

To start things off, set up your digital canvas and create a new transparent layer for your puppy's outline.

1. Gesture drawing and form

Your first step in learning how to draw a puppy should always be looking at its form. From the skeletal system to its muscles mass, study it carefully and look for similarities to the human form.

Since it is a mammal, you will discover that a lot of the bone and muscle structures are very similar to our own (albeit rearranged differently).

The advantage of knowing this is that you can create an artistic mannequin, from the resulting gesture drawing, that you can use to pose with.

On the diagram, I quickly built up a small mannequin frame of my dog based on a simple sketch outlining the dog’s form. The key here is looking at the limbs like the shoulder blades and the leg bones.

Although my dog does not look anything like a puppy on the main diagram, I can still use it to make a puppy of my own without having any particular references.

This is the beauty of gesture drawings: it lets you play with many different types of variations! That goes without saying that if there is a specific type of breed you want to draw, then you will need references.

2. Gesture drawing of fur

The next step in learning how to draw a puppy is to give your gesture drawing some animal like qualities. With the guidelines, quickly sketch in where the facial features are first.

Just paint in a dark patch of where the eyes and nose is. You will be adding a few details to this later near the end.

For the rest of the drawing, begin working on fur. You will need to draw spurts of small lines all around the perimeter of your gesture drawing.

In part, this is also a contour drawing because you are essentially outlining all the key parts of the animal. Do not ever draw your fur lines in the same direction as your sketch!

What you want to do is draw these small spurts of fur running perpendicular to the main outline. For instance, you want to draw the fur spanning out of the head rather than following the outline of the head.

At the same time, consider how gravity works on fur. Depending on the length of the fur, you may need to angle it downwards a bit.

3. Smudging the fur

Here is where the magic comes in for learning how to draw a puppy! Up to this point, you are simply using your brush tools to create the gesture and fur outlines.

Now, we are going to use the smudge brush to finish off the rest. The type of texture you should use is a chalk brush (other variations such as the splatter texture will work just as well).

This will give you a varied hard edge to smudge your lines with. Using your pressure sensitive drawing stylus, begin smudging the contour lines.

In addition to remembering to smudge in the same direction as the fur, make sure you do it back and forth in a zigzag like pattern!

Switching brush sizes will have different effects on smudging. Smaller brush sizes will create fine lines while a larger brush will create a large blur.

This can be useful for determining depth as objects not in immediate focus will tend to be slightly blurry. You can use this method for the tail as it is farthest away from the viewer in this angle.

4. Adding details

Once you are satisfied with how your fur looks in the previous stage, the final steps will require you to add additional details.

There will be two sections here. In the first, you need to add necessary shadows and lighting to your digital illustration.

Think about where the light will hit and where the light will not hit. Then, switch to a large brush and lightly paint in shadows and light.

After that, switch to a smaller brush. Here, you will concentrate on refining the fur around the outlines. While still following the direction of the smudge, gently paint in the remaining fur.

If you have not already, add in some details to the eyes and mouth. These can be done simply by putting in spots of light in the darken outlines.

You can also preserve the transparency of the dog layer and add in even more shading without fear of going outside the outline of your puppy.

Congratulations! You now know one of the methods of learning how to draw a puppy digitally! I hope you enjoyed this lesson. The rest is just practice!

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