How to Draw Animals from Photos: Eyes, Fur and What the Camera Misses

Get the photo at the animal’s eye level

Most pet photos are taken standing up, looking down. That shrinks the body, enlarges the top of the head and hides the chin. For a portrait, get down so the lens is level with the animal’s eyes. The dog in this guide was photographed at eye level, which is why the face reads straight on and the two eyes are the same size.

Stay back and zoom in rather than moving the phone close. Dogs with long muzzles are especially affected by close camera distances: the nose swells and the eyes appear to sit further back. Animals also move, so use burst mode or a fast shutter speed and pick the frame where the eyes are sharp. A sharp eye with a blurred ear is usable. A blurred eye is not.

What an outline captures, and what it loses

Outlines are made by finding edges where the brightness changes sharply. That works well for the features that matter most for likeness. In the outline below, the eye shapes, the nose and nostrils, the line of the mouth and the tongue are all clear, because each one is a hard edge against a different value.

The ears almost disappear. In the photo they are light, soft fur against a light, blurred background, so there is little edge to find. The same happens with white fur against a pale wall, black fur in shadow, and any fluffy silhouette. This is not a fault in one tool; it is how edge detection works. Treat the outline as a map of the features and draw the soft outer silhouette from the photo.

Draw the eyes for the species

Pupil shape is one of the quickest ways to make an animal look right or wrong. Dogs have round pupils. Domestic cats have vertical slit pupils that narrow in bright light and open into near-circles in dim light, so match the slit width to the lighting in your photo. Horses, goats and sheep have horizontal, elongated pupils. Drawing a round pupil in a goat makes it look strangely human.

Watch for flash eyeshine. Cats and dogs have a reflective layer behind the retina, and on-camera flash makes their eyes glow green, yellow or blue. That glow is a camera artefact. Unless you want it, draw the eye from a photo without flash, or keep the iris colour and replace the glow with a small, sharp highlight.

In the finished dog, each eye has one small bare-paper highlight, a dark rim around the iris and soft lower lids. The eyes are the most detailed part of the drawing and the rest of the face is looser, which pulls the viewer’s attention exactly where the artist wanted it.

Fur: draw masses and direction, then a few hairs

Squint at the photo and fur falls into a few large shapes of light and dark. Draw those first, as soft-edged patches, following the direction the fur grows. Only then add individual hairs, and only at the edges of those shapes and along the outer silhouette, where single hairs are actually visible against the background.

White fur is drawn with shadow, not white. In the finished dog, the blaze running between the eyes and down to the nose is mostly bare paper, defined by the golden fur on either side and a few cool grey strokes where it turns away from the light. Long, windblown fur, like these ears, works best with long, curved strokes that taper at the end, built up in several light layers.

Check the drawing against the photo, not the outline

Once the outline has done its job of placing the features, put it away. Compare your drawing with the photo at arm’s length. Check the space between the eyes, the length of the muzzle and the angle of each ear. If the likeness is off, the cause is usually one of these spacings, not the fur.

Animal owners notice small things that strangers miss: a slightly crooked ear, a patch of darker fur, the way one eye droops. Before you finish a commission, ask the owner what they notice first about their pet, and make sure it is in the drawing.

Questions before you start