Mountain Goats

I have been studying Terry Runyan’s great book - Draw 62 Animals and Make Them Happy

It’s a great resource for practicing drawing cute animals. Plus it’s fun and relaxing to sketch using Terry’s work as a guide. I used to worry that doing this kind of thing would end up looking too much like the artist - and would not be unique to me. Now that I’ve been playing around with it - I realize that if someone were to look at my Mountain Goats, they probably wouldn’t think - “oh look, she’s trying to be like Terry Runyan”

I think the trick, and I’ve heard this from many others, is to copy from reference - then put the reference away and draw from your own memory. Then you will have something unique.

Here is how my mountain goat started - with a pencil sketch:

This is how it ended up looking after vectorizing in Adobe Illustrator and adding color:

Then I ended up doing another sketch because I wasn’t quite happy with this one. Here is my second sketch:

This one I really liked - so I brought it into Photoshop and played around with some gouache brushes. Lately, I have been keeping the sketch layer on - setting to multiply and lowering opacity. I’m liking how this is looking:

I think I’m going to keep playing around with drawing animals in this style.