How to Draw a Dog

Drawing a dog is actually not that difficult if you learn some simple guidelines. Soon you will know how to draw a dog in the specific way I show you here, and after practicing a few times you should be able to draw other kinds of dogs because you will get the feeling of how a dog is build.

The first dog I will show you how to draw here is a retriever of some kind.

Start with a simple box just to get the shape of the dog's body:

     

Now you add box-lines for the head, legs and tail. Also add some curves for the front part of the body.

So far so good. Until now it is quite simple, isn't it!

        

Now you soften the different straight lines into curves, because of course the dog's body is not build with straight lines and boxes. All that is just to get the overall shape for the dog drawing.

I hope it is easy to see where I have changes the lines from the original to the more natural outlines.

          

Finally you erase the guidelines you don't need anymore:

    

And now you have made a great drawing of a dog!

If you like you can add color. I have done this very quick on the computer, just to show the drawing with color.

Here is a drawing of a dogs skeleton seen from the side.
An understanding of the dog's anatomy will help you to know how to draw a dog.

As you might have noticed I have a page here on Clipartqueen with dog sketches.

I made most of them as drawings made after pictures, in fact I am really bad at drawing without some kind of model or picture.
When I draw a dog I normally start with a soft outline, like the ones above, just to get the overall idea of how big the drawing shall be, and to find the right proportions.

After that I build the drawing using "the negative forms" in the picture.
Now what is that?

"The negative forms" are for example these: 

See the gray area between the dog's legs, that is what I mean by a "negative form".

Often these forms are easier to see than the actual forms of the dog because you don't get confused by different colors and also you don't get confused by what you think you know about how a dog is shaped.