How to draw cartoon dogs – part 3

Welcome back. Let’s quickly take a look at the body-form of a dog (top), and compare that to a cat (bottom).

As you can see, the basic form is the same – after all, they both share the same skeletal structure common to all mammals: giraffe to goat, bat to bear, mouse to man…  It’s just in the relative proportions of the various parts of the structure that create the differences in body-form, -  and the external “padding”.

But back to our dog and cat…

The main difference you may notice is in the length of the torso. The dog is fairly compact, whereas the cat is longer and sleeker. Dogs also tend to have a more pronounced chest than cats, giving certain breeds a waistline (here I’ve kept it simple though).

Dog’s legs tend to be longer too (depending on the breed of course), and especially the heel-to-toe length on the hind legs. And don’t forget to notice the tail: thicker, bushier and shorter than that of a cat. If you’ve been drawing cats for some time. then you won’t have any problems adapting the form to draw a dog (and vice versa!).

Turning your “dog sketch” into a cartoon is further just a question of applying the steps of caricature again – deciding on the strongest physical characteristics and expanding them. This could be the form of the face, the ears, the eyes; the head/snout proportion; specific “breed” features such as the hanging cheeks of a bloodhound, or the crumpled face and stumpy posture of a bulldog; or the coat pattern (spots and patches), length and texture (fluffy, hairy, short, long, groomed and shiny, or scruffy and wild..).

Take all your ideas from real dogs – there is so much variety that you can’t fail to come up with something original. So, as always, here are some “dog-cartoon-characters”of my own to get you motivated:

A special word on Puppies…

I’ll be covering “baby animals” in a later post, but there’s no reason you can’t include puppies among your dog cartooning.  The main technique for drawing puppies is to keep all the proportions compact – but keep the head big, the eyes big, and the paws big. This is the way nature, and Disney, make baby animals cute!