Basic Dog Drawing - Great Dane

For my final drawing, I decided to draw the hardest one in the book to test my abilities. This one had so much detail that I knew it was going to be a challenge. Great Danes are also, along with Golden retrievers, one of my favorite types of dogs. When I was younger I had two black and white Great Danes and currently we own a grey and black one named Captain so I knew drawing this would be enjoyable.

The book starts it off simple as always. The first step is, “Draw a pear shape for the main body. Add lines for the neck, and shape the head and ears. Outline the rear legs, then draw shapes for the front legs. (Make sure the front legs are a little longer than the rear legs.) Add a curved shape for the tail” (Green 17). This was mostly easy. The hint to make the front legs longer really helped in the end.

The next step still, was very simple. It was only a little bit of refining which wasn’t that hard. Also, since I had practiced I knew the techniques to do it. The step for refining is, “Refine the outline of the head taking care of the ears and chin. Define the legs and the outline of the tummy” (Green 17). I think that them telling me to focus on the ears and chin really helped me make the drawing look better.

After the first part of the details were done, we really just refined more. We refined the legs, and a bit of the body and added an eye and a nose; “Add shapes for the eye and the nose, and continue to refine the body outline and the legs” (Green 17). I think it helped to split up the refining into two so there wasn’t a ton of changes at once.

In this drawing, the last step was definitely the hardest. The markings on Great Danes are very unique and hard to match perfectly. This step was the most stressful of all the drawings I did and really put the test to the abilities I’ve learned while drawing these. The step was, “Add more detail to the ears, eyes, and nose. Draw contour lines on the neck, chest, and stomach. Finish by drawing large and small shapes for the spot and detail the toes and nails” (Green 17). Again, this was by far the hardest part of this drawing as I had gotten a lot of opportunities to practice the other techniques.

Final thoughts: This was probably my most favorite drawing that I did. I think the details are very good and the overall shape is nice.

Questions: Would you try to draw this? If you drew this, would you add this many markings or take some away? How would you change the drawing?