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Using the method as described by Jack Hamm in his book "How to Draw Animals", I tried to draw a cheetah, using a reference photo (see comment). I now know that you have to do a lot of these to get the feel for the animal, where the masses lie and how they behave in relation to the pose.

I'm trying to establish a pose of a dog, in other words, where the individual parts go. I think this is valuable time to spend on a drawing if you want it to be believable, a "true" representation of your subject (it can never be really true, because it's just a drawing, not the subject itself).

I've modified the approach presented in How to Draw Animals by Jack Hamm slightly, because that method presupposes a side view, while this is more like a three-quarter view.

Anyway, you're supposed to keep it loose and sketchy, and this is perhaps still too formal. I will do a couple more of these (and of other animals) before I go to the next stage, which is rounding the blocks into more organic shapes. As the book suggests, this step is tricky, because you can only do it reliably if you have internalized the build and structure of a particular animal or breed of animal. The best you can hope for is to do a rough approximation. If you have done enough of those, your roughs will become close enough to be useful for a more elaborate drawing or painting. This is the whole purpose of sketching: learning the shape, making it your own.

I saw this photo of a Welsh Corgi elsewhere on Flickr (can't find it, because Flickr is so slow on my end right now), which I used to make this drawing.

Pixels Pro was advertised in the iTunes App Store as a "powerful graphics editing program". A high claim, which I found to be untrue.

Pixels Pro was on sale for a limited time, so I decided to try it as a painting tool. It turned out that, on the original iPad, at least, it's not really suited for that. I don't own an iPad 2, so maybe it's tested and tweaked for that device. The further I went along, the slower the app got. I suppose it's all the undos. As a workaround you could save the artwork in the gallery and then edit the saved version.

I'm sure as an editor it is great. As a drawing/painting program it's below average. Procreate is much better, although it has less features. Features isn't everything. In fact, you can have too many of them.

I took a 1024 x 1024 canvas and a photo as the basis for my paining. I drew an outline on top of the photo (in a separate layer) and used several layers to add digital paint, after which I made both the photo and outline invisible in the final output.

Unfortunately, 1024 seems to be the maximum value of either width or height, which makes editing photos not very useful, since most photos are much larger than that (at least 6 megapixels, which is one-sixth of Pixel Pro's pixel count). It outputs a lower resolution than the original and that can't be right.

This idea started with the concept that a horse is like a cabinet with long legs, a head and a tail. Then I considered that the body can be divided up into three parts: the shoulder area, the rear area and the middle area. The random idea was to add beach volleyball for horses.

However, I saw that many people in my hometown have zebra-themed statues in their windowsills. So, it may be that zebras are popular now with the hipster crowd. Who knew!

The zebra is drawn using reference, yet still very naive, as animal drawings go. I'm sure I need to study horses more closely to make it more believable.