Rukus (with Pet Portraiture Tips)

 

7/30/25 Rukus (reference photo by Katelyn This)

Bright-eyed Rukus is in the same family as Jett and Maggie. Something tells me that this little guy is a handful (perhaps his name is a clue)!

I’ve often talked about the many things I’ve learned from my long and now-large series of pet portraits (nearly a hundred are in my Flickr album). I’m probably repeating some thoughts here, but I wanted to list what I have found to be some of the most important characteristics of realistic pet portraiture. If you feel like drawing pets, maybe some of these tips will be helpful.

• I can’t stress this enough: Get a well-lighted, in-focus reference photo. It often helps to have multiple images of the animal from different angles, in case some information is unclear in your primary reference.
  
  
• The eyes are critical. Humans and their pets (maybe especially dogs) spend a lot of time making eye contact, so the eyes have to be right, or the human won’t feel the connection. I spend more time on the eyes than I do on any other feature or all that fur.
   
• As in portrait photography, a super-important part of the eyes is the catchlight. If the
  
  reference photo doesn’t have one, I will fake it – it’s that important in conveying life in the eyes.
  
  
• I can’t remember whose class it was (maybe Gary Faigin’s) or which book I read, but here’s a tip about drawing eyes (human, but it applies to animals, too) that has stayed with me: The upper eyelid always makes a subtle shadow on the top of the eyeball. A good reference photo will show this, and if you learn to look for it, you will observe it, even if it’s subtle. The tip I learned said that beginner portrait artists will often draw the eye as if the entire iris is visible, but it is almost always partially obscured by that shadow. If you nail that, the eyes will look more realistic.
  
  
• With dogs, almost as important as the catchlight are the subtle reflections on the lower edge of the nostrils. It’s not a bright highlight, as the nose is not shiny, but it is always moist, which creates the reflection.
  
  
• Here’s a helpful dog tip I learned from Sketching Scottie: In life-drawing classes and books, we always learn that the average human face has about one eye width between our eyes. In dogs, the space is two eye widths. I measure every time, and it’s true! Well, as in human anatomy, it’s a general guideline, not a universal rule. I’m working on a dog portrait now whose eyes are much farther apart than two eye widths. And the face must be straight head-on like Rukus is here, with no angle, to measure it accurately. But it is helpful to understand basic anatomical structures.