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How do you learn to draw a cow ?
I started with copying the heads of cows on various photos (my own and some in a cow book).
Actually, the hardest part of the cow is the head (the hardest part to draw, I mean).
And the hardest part about the head (again, to draw) are the ears.
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The first two heads from the left in the row below are drawn from real-life models, Prim'Holstein cows at the Agricultural Fair
in Paris. I started drawing one cow's head but she then put it down to eat some hay, so I took her unmoving neighbour,
a brown-spotted Holstein as a model. Looking from the cow to my sketchpad and back I didn't see the hay coming.
All of a sudden, the first cow dumped a mouthful of hay on my sketchpad (and there is still some in my kneadable eraser
which fell down when I moved in surprise). I am convinced she did it on purpose, either because she thought the drawing
didn't resemble her (which I admit it didn't, as I wasn't using her as a model) or because she was angry I'd moved on
to her neighbour...
I love cows!
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When I thought I got it, I moved on to legs -
front legs and hind legs are sensibly different, and hind legs are the more difficult of the two.
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Udders and tails aren't tricky, nor are the black spots of the Holstein - so here are my first "full cows".
The center one is too long. And the one on the left is the first cow I did without any model at all!
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Now the cows below I had a lot of fun drawing at the International Agricultural Fair in Paris - life cows close up, I thought.
The right one, as her name indicates, is Pastelle - a fitting name for a drawn cow, although I only used graphite pencils.
The one in the center is actually two cows, the body is that of Palmhera, a Norman, but she wouldn't hold her head still
(the part of a cow that moves the most when the tail is not required to scare flies away), so I moved on to Poupée,
one of her neighbours and of course also a Norman.
The one on the left I can't remember at all, I think I drew her from memory at home. I know her front legs are too short,
but I'd started her before the Fair and then did Pastelle too closely underneath, so when I wanted to finish her, there wasn't enough
space left for the legs...
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Carried away after some ear studies, here are two cows I did in a single evening:
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