How to Draw a Real Tiger

Artist: JTM93 / January 1, 2011
How to Draw a Real Tiger

Step 1.


Preparation Begin by choosing a medium to high resolution photo of a tiger’s head and copy the photo into Microsoft word. Here you are able to manipulate the photo to a size that you would like to draw. Set the page resolution to 100% (bottom ri   

Step 2.


Equipment • HB, 4B pencils • Q-tips (cotton-buds) or alternatively cotton-pads (make-up removers) or tissues. • Ruler • White pastel pencil (optional) *Image: To draw whiskers or strands of hair, you can use a technique called masking.   

Step 3.


When drawing large areas of thick, rugged fur, I recommend holding the pencil as shown and making wide, sweeping and swift pencil strokes.

Step 4.


If you are not yet a confident sketcher you can trace an outline of the tiger’s head. Alternatively, you can use a grid method or my simpler reference-point method to create an outline for your drawing. In my method, you need to choose several poin   

Step 5.


This is more or less the amount of detail necessary in your outline.

Step 6.


Now that the gruelling work is over, we can begin to render the tiger face. Start with an HB pencil and draw a light base layer of shading to areas of the face that appear smooth. It is important that this base layer is smooth – do not add any deta   

Step 7.


With the base shading done, we can now add some depth to the nose and mouth areas. You do not need to start reaching for your 4B pencil yet – an HB pencil is more than adequate. When shading the darker areas of the nose, refer to the photo as often   

Step 8.


This step focuses on the mouth area – specifically the whiskers. In my opinion, the whiskers on any big cat are perhaps the most important facial feature to get correct. They must be white and this presents a problem – we can’t actually draw th   

Step 9.


This step is all about adding stripes to the side of the face. When drawing the stripes, a general rule of thumb is to avoid drawing straight edges – as these stripes need to blend into a fur texture, a jagged edge makes for a better transition.    

Step 10.


The penultimate step! The first area of focus is the ear. You want to get a good variety of highlights to define the individual strands of hair. Follow the same method outlined for drawing the whiskers but be a little less clinical to achieve a more    

Step 11.


This final step is all about cleaning the drawing up. Firstly, get an eraser and go over the large area of fur in the bottom-left corner with large sweeping strokes to add large highlights to the fur texture. This is optional as some people may p   

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Details

Artist: JTM93
Date Added: January 1, 2011
Steps: 11
Favorited: 1 (view)
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Tags: draw realistic animals, how to draw realistic, draw realistic, how to draw real, how to draw tigers, how to sketch, sketching in pencil
Description: Welcome to this detailed pencil sketch tutorial that will guide you in a fashionable way on "<em><strong>sketching a tiger</em></strong>", step by step. The tiger featured in this lesson took a while to complete but during that process, there's a step by step guide showing you how I created my realistic tiger drawing. Tigers are large and beautiful big cats that are wildly popular in every dimension of artists. Taking your time to learn "<em>how to draw a real tiger</em></strong>", will definitely increase your skills in the sketch pencil method. I hope this tutorial will be useful in your future drawings as I had fun creating it. Get yourself a set of standard quality sketching pencils and A4 paper for this tutorial. Observe the steps and think it through before you make a move on your drawing. Anyways, thanks so much for viewing and have fun!

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