Animals Such As They Are

June 6, 2019 10:11 AM

Peruse Les Animaux Tels Qu’ils Sont, a book from the 1930s that shows how to draw animals starting from basic shapes (though the jump from second-to-last to the finished animal can be sizable). (via kottke.org)
posted by Etrigan (13 comments total)

Draw the rest of the fucking owl [imgur]
posted by Fish Sauce at 10:18 AM on June 6, 2019 [19 favorites]

Neat! The inclusion of une chauve-souris in les oiseaux de nuit is a little odd.
posted by jedicus at 10:22 AM on June 6, 2019

came for draw-the-goddamn-owl, was satisfied
posted by thelonius at 10:23 AM on June 6, 2019 [6 favorites]

Also: went to /r/restofthefuckingowl, had been beaten to the punch
posted by wenestvedt at 10:26 AM on June 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

part of me wants to print all of these and frame them for a kid's room or something
posted by dismas at 10:48 AM on June 6, 2019 [4 favorites]

I know, I know! I found them on Flickr and also in wikimedia, and I plan to assemble them into an EPUB -- and also see what kind of high-res versions I can put together for printing out.
posted by wenestvedt at 10:51 AM on June 6, 2019

The How to Draw Animals (1930) | Hacker News thread has links to PDFs of all of the images in the comments.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:56 AM on June 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

Draw the rest of the fucking owl [imgur]

Heh. That's how it always struck me when I would try to follow along with those "How to draw a [blank]" instructional guides when I was a kid:

How to draw a kangaroo

1. Draw a large square, a medium size triangle, and two small circles
2. Learn how to draw a kangaroo
3. Erase shapes and draw a kangaroo instead

posted by Atom Eyes at 10:58 AM on June 6, 2019 [6 favorites]

Draw the rest of the fucking owl

Ed Emberly (flash-based website (c) 2004; previously) is much more honest with his instructions (Flickr), which made him a favorite of mine as a kid. If you draw a rectangle, you use a rectangle, no erasing needed. You don't end up with that fucking owl, but what you make is still pretty clearly an owl.

Which is not to say Les Animaux Tels Qu’ils Sont is a bad or misleading book, but it's more advanced than Ed's drawing pages.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:17 AM on June 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

Technically this is a duplicate post, but hopefully the mods are kind and leave this because it has been 10 years since I posted it.
posted by fings at 11:31 AM on June 6, 2019 [4 favorites]

The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter.
posted by basalganglia at 2:50 PM on June 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

How to Draw the Tick! (next time, Learn to Draw like Albrecht Dürer!)
posted by Rock Steady at 7:00 AM on June 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Also, the actual tough part of drawing is not going from some assembled basic shapes to a fully detailed depiction, it's getting the proportions and relationships of those basic shapes just right.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:05 AM on June 7, 2019