I frequently talk about how doing portraits of a person can be one of the most frustrating things that an aspiring artist can attempt to do. The various wrinkles, nose sizes and positions, as well as eye shape makes recreating a person's face extremely difficult. This is why I encourage my students to not focus on realism when they are putting humans into their scenes and when we do work on portraits I have a grid system for them to break it down so that they are actually only doing one "square" of a person's face every time rather than trying to get the entire thing correct on the first try.
It might seem like a strange approach and other educators would even say that this is a cheating method and doesn't encourage real talent. I personally feel that art lies in all of us in different ways and the ability of a certain person cannot be tapped by any particular method. Either they are going to take to it or they are not and the best way to tap that potential is by accident... and accident that is never going to happen if things become too complicated especially at the beginning of the process.
I've also found that students, and to a certain extent me, would much rather draw animals than people anyway. Children in particular as well as adults like me find animals to be fare more interesting and cute than humans. Recently we did a project where we repeated the portrait process using a photo as a guide but this time the end result was to be of a dog, cat, or any other animal that the student wanted. Most student's chose a pet that was theirs at some point in their lives. I found that even though we didn't even get to the watercolor stage, and likely wont, that most of the students ended up feeling like I do and that is that drawing animals is even more difficult than drawing humans.
You can still see the grid markings in this one as I encourage them to work on only one small square at a time while they learn the nuances of how an animals face is actually shaped.
The reason for this should be obvious but mainly it is because of the fact that the same difficulties and unique aspects of an animal exist in the same capacity that they do in humans. Most dogs look distinctly different from another dog and of course all the hair going all different directions can prove quite difficult to get just right.
We didn't encounter this on purpose, but we discovered that drawing pics of dogs that were asleep to be a bit easier than those that had their eyes open. Eyes, just generally speaking are very difficult to replicate so the students who were using a photo of a sleeping animal had a much easier time of it.
I constantly will tell my students to not get frustrated because even some of the best artists who ever lived had an Achille's heel of sorts including Picasso, who was famously terrible at painting cats.
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For someone who knew nothing about art or art history, if they were shown these images and asked who they thought painted it they almost certainly would assume that it was a finger painting by a child at school and not one of the most famous painters of all time but those are all by Picasso.
There are those that would say, probably correctly, that Picasso made them whimsical on purpose but the fact remains that there are certain styles out there that could really end up catching the eye of the public and this is why I don't think there is one "correct" way to do art. Just because your replica doesn't look perfect, doesn't mean it isn't good. If we wanted a one-to-one exact copy we could just use a copy machine.
So if you are ever attempting to draw an animal, don't sweat the fact that you might get some of the aspects of it a bit wrong. That might be exactly what you need in order to make your work unique and interesting to the observer!
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