How do I draw animals and pets so they look like the animal?

Build the animal from two masses and a spine before any fur exists, get the eye and muzzle relationship right for the likeness, and treat coat as a form with a direction rather than as texture.

Difficulty: intermediate
Time: 40 min
Read: 5 min

Short answer

Block in the ribcage and the hindquarters as two ovals joined by the spine, then add the legs as directions and the head as a simple mass. Only then check the specifics that carry the likeness — the length of the muzzle, the set and size of the eyes, the ear shape. Draw the fur last, in the direction it grows, and only where it changes plane.

The difficulty with animals is that you cannot ask them to hold still and you have no internal model of their skeleton the way you do for a human. Both problems are solved the same way: simplify to two big masses and a line, which you can capture in seconds from a moving animal, and learn one or two structural facts about the species you keep drawing.

Step by step

Reduce the body to two masses and a spine.Almost every four-legged mammal is a ribcage mass at the front and a pelvis mass at the back, joined by a flexible spine, with the shoulder blades sitting on the outside of the ribcage. Draw those three things and you have a pose.
Get the leg direction from the joints, and note that the back legs bend backwards.The hock on a dog, cat or horse is the ankle, not the knee, and it points backwards — the actual knee is much higher and buried in the body outline. Drawing four human-style legs is what makes an animal look like a pantomime horse.
Set the head as a mass with a muzzle attached.A ball for the cranium and a box or wedge for the muzzle. The relative size of those two is the biggest single difference between breeds and between species, and it is where most of the likeness lives.
Place the eyes on the sides for prey animals and the front for predators.Horses, rabbits and sheep have eyes on the sides of the head with a wide field of view. Cats, dogs and owls face forward. Getting this wrong changes the animal's whole character even when everything else is right.
Draw the eye as a wet sphere in a socket, exactly as with a human.Same rules — a shadow from the upper lid, a dark pupil, one bright specular highlight. A pet portrait lives or dies on the eyes and they are drawn no differently.
Establish the coat pattern as value masses before texture.A tabby's stripes, a collie's white blaze, a horse's socks — these are shapes, and they follow the form round the body. Draw them as tone, following the contour of the animal underneath.
Draw fur only where it does something.At the silhouette, where the coat changes direction, where it thickens at the ruff or the tail, and where a plane turns. Uniform fur strokes over the whole animal read as a rug. Everywhere else, tone alone is enough.
Follow the growth direction with every mark.Fur grows in tracts, sweeping back from the nose, down the neck, out along the legs. Marks that follow those tracts describe the form; marks that ignore them flatten it.
Work from many photographs and from life for the gesture.Use a photo for the detail and a live animal for the movement. Ten thirty-second sketches of a cat shifting position teach you more about how a cat is built than one hour copying a photograph.

Tips

Feathers work at a larger scale than fur — draw the feather groups (the layered rows on a wing, the breast, the coverts) as shapes first, and individual feathers only at the wing edge.
For a pet portrait commission, the client is judging the eyes and the expression. Spend the time there and simplify the body.
Whiskers are lifted out of finished tone with a sharp eraser or scratched in with a blade — drawing dark whiskers on a dark face never works.
Long-haired animals hide the structure completely, which tempts you to skip it. The silhouette will be wrong if you do, because the hair hangs off a body that has a shape.

Common mistakes

Starting with the outline of the animal — An animal outline is complicated and mostly made of hair. Without the two-mass structure underneath it, the drawing has no volume and no pose.
Bending the back legs the wrong way — It is the single most recognisable animal-drawing error. The visible backwards-pointing joint on a hind leg is the heel.
Drawing every hair — Same fault as with human hair, and it costs more time. Tone first, texture at the edges.
Making the eyes too large and too round — Enlarging eyes is the same instinct as with people and it turns a specific animal into a generic cute one, which is fatal for a pet portrait.

If it doesn't work

It looks like a generic dog rather than your dog

Cause: Muzzle length and eye placement averaged out — Fix: Measure the muzzle against the cranium in the reference, and the gap between the eyes against the eye width. Those two ratios carry the breed and the individual.

The animal looks stuffed

Cause: No line of action, weight not resting on anything — Fix: Draw the spine curve first as a gesture, and check where the weight sits over the feet.

The fur looks like a texture pattern

Cause: Uniform marks ignoring the growth tracts and the form — Fix: Knock it back with a broad tone, re-establish the value masses, then add direction-following marks only at edges and plane changes.

Questions people ask

Do I need to learn animal anatomy?

A little, and it pays back quickly: the two-mass body, the shoulder blade on the outside of the ribcage, and the fact that the hock is an ankle. Beyond that, observation does more than study for most people.

Is it acceptable to work entirely from photographs?

For animals it is nearly unavoidable and it is completely normal practice. Use your own photographs, or licensed reference — see the guide on drawing from someone else's photograph.

How do I draw a black dog or cat?

Not as black. A black coat is a mid grey with strong highlights following the form, and true black only in the deepest recesses. Drawing it dark all over loses the animal entirely.