Deer stand on their toenails in an ungulagrade stance. This means that the heel and the wrist are about half way up the portion of the leg that is visible below the line of the belly. Capture the posture, proportions, and angles of the deer with light quick lines. Check your proportions and then go back and add your details. Do not rush into the detailed drawing too soon. To accurately draw a deer, details must be supported by a solid and anatomically correct structure.
In the drawings below I use a compleated drawing of the deer to show what I am moving toward in the steps. The blue lines represent my first guide lines that I would use to block in the body before drawing the details. In a real practice, the guide lines come before the detail lines.
Click the first image to start the slideshow.
Start with the posture of the animal, the sweep of the back or an indication of the motion of the spine.
Now add a proportion box. How tall vs wide is the body of the animal? This box will be different shapes for different animals. A cow would be a horizontal rectangle.
Note how far down the proportion box is the line of the belly. A cow will have a much deeper belly than a deer.
Indicate the size and location of the head. It is very easy to make the head too big or too far forward. Double check this detail.
Draw the location of the legs using shorthand sticks. Note that the back legs are bent and the front are straight. Also notice that the legs do not insert at the corners of the body rectangle but in a little from the edges.
Now use negative shapes to capture the angles of the body and the proportions of the legs. If the negative shape does not fit on your drawing, change the drawing now before you add any details. In this diagram I have shaded the negative shapes to help draw your attention to them. When I am really drawing, I just trace around their edges as you will see in the next image.
Here we see the form of the body starting to take shape due to the negative shapes. I emphasize the angularity of the body to make sure that the angles do not become obscured by over rounding.
I suggest the masses of the muscles of the legs. The mass over the rear leg is large than that in the front. The muscle masses on the body form angled brackets < > that frame the body like parentheses. Observe that the muscle masses go from large against the body to mid sized to small as you get further away from the body..
I draw a circle to approximate the dimensions of the antlers. This will keep me from making my antlers too big as I start drawing. It is easy to over do it on the parts of a drawing that capture our interest.
If you block in a solid framework, you are ready to draw your details on top of it. These guide lines are much darker than the ones I draw on my paper but are emphasized here to help demonstrate the steps.
