#it's so much easier with my furry ocs where they're already an animal

[its-a-me-mango]

I saw your post about art fight (and by the way congrats and I'm impressed by the amount of pieces you've done) and you mentioned drawing furries. I kind of never did but I want to learn, do you have any tips on drawing furries?

Hi yeah my advice is to have an older brother tell you what furries are at the age of 8 and then get completely obsessed with drawing anthropomorphic characters until the age of 18, so if you missed out on that I'm sorry. /j

Anyway, my actual advice is to get used to drawing animals in general. If you already know how to draw humans then you've already done most of the work when it comes to furries, if not thats ok you can learn as you go! I always recommend looking at other peoples work that you look up to and seeing how they do it. Learning to look and pick out shapes and features is always my best advice, it's something you learn to do as you grow but being able to pick out characteristics, shapes and all sorts of what you're looking at will massively help with your work, never be afraid to look up reference!

Simply taking the time to understand how to draw some animals can help set you up for drawing furries, you don't have to learn every single animal right off the bat, just the ones you're interested in to start off with. Once you know how to draw one or two, all the other species should become much easier to learn, or if you just wanna stick with the one species that's fine too, whatever you're happiest doing!

For example, say you wanna draw dog furries, thats fair dogs are cool! I like border collies so I'm focusing on them, look at these guys they're so fluffyyyy

Right away you can pick out some key features, the pointy ears, the medium length snout, the long fur (especially around the neck), the markings, the fluffy tail, these are all key things that make up our awesome collie dog, taking the time to practice these traits first will help you later on for drawing furries, you can practice as you go if you want but if you're starting with nothing, go basic!

Once you're comfortable with drawing animals, putting those traits onto a human shouldn't be as daunting, head goes where the head is, tail goes at the end of the spine, and fur goes all over! Obviously there are so many ways to draw furries but I'm trying to be basic to start off with! Practising with putting human emotions/traits onto animals will help a lot to refine what you're doing, your first attempts won't be pretty so don't worry about trying to make them so, they're for practice after all!

Using this as my excuse to draw my border collie SMG4 inspired OC, come look at Jay he sucks so bad, you'll never guess who he's inspired by. Again learning to mix human emotions and put them onto cartoon animal heads is hard to learn but I promise it's possible and great fun once you know how!

There's no one set of rules for furries, it's whatever you feel works best! Add and take away whatever you want, maybe you want them blue and green with horns and wings, that's totally fine! Get as creative as you want and don't be afraid to go wild, furries aren't real after all, you can do anything you want!

Furries are so expressive and unique, it's one of the many reasons I love drawing them! You can get so much diversity and variation with their design and characters, they can be as realistic or as cartoony as you want! It's always important to have fun with what you're drawing and to be okay with making mistakes, you're not going to get it first try so might as well have fun getting to a point you're happy with!

Hope my insane ramblings helped somewhat, I never know if these actually help because my advice is always just "look at reference and say "fuck it we ballin" untill it looks right", I can't teach that to anyone I have to sound like I know what I'm doing lmao

[thecraftgremlin]

Giving characters animal motifs is hard.