How to Draw Wolves

um hi everybody welcome to the nature journal workshop today is a special program on drawing wolves um and we have a special guest with us today alex from the wolf conservation center who is going to be giving us a little bit of information about wolf conservation a wolf recovery and um also how how people can connect and get involved with that at the center they have some wonderful live webcams we'll be using those at the end of our workshop today to do a bit of live sketching from wolves and those are webcams that people can visit anytime they want we're also going to have a little bit of information in the middle um about some wolf anatomy and uh and how to draw wolves so you may well um alex is presenting if you go to the chat you will see that there is a link to a download with the skeleton of a wolf we'll be using that and drawing over it adding in some essentials to help us be able to think about how to draw and paint wolves today and so you while um alex is presenting you might want to tell your printer to print that out so you've got that sheet on hand and ready to go um welcome everyone and uh a special warm welcome to alex who is one of the stewards of the the wolf packs that are up at the wolf conservation center uh alex i'm going to spotlight you and uh hello hello um and um thank you so much for being here with us um and perhaps you can tell us some background about uh the wolves wolves wolf conservation and uh the work of the center yeah so i'm just gonna uh scream actually sorry i'm gonna interrupt you one more time sorry about this if uh we're gonna have um alex is gonna have to leave early today if at during his presentation anybody has any questions please type those into the chat melinda is going to monitor those questions and at the end of alex's presentation um she may feed him a couple of uh high percentage questions from our group but in the uh but uh so now without further ado um alex thank you so much for being with us today no problem i'm gonna go ahead and screen share real quick i'm just so you guys have some good wolf pictures to look at instead of instead of my face let's see all right can you guys see that okay yes we do perfect all right um well thank you all for for inviting me here today my name is alex with the wolf conservation center i've been here for about nine years doing a little bit of a lot of things we teach programs uh we are the home to 41 wolves at this point in time that number is constantly fluctuating um so we're both an education center as well as a captive breeding center um so just real quick i'm going to give you guys a little bit of a rundown on what it is that we do here at our center and then and then uh we'll have time for a couple of questions as well but like i said we're the home to 41 wolves right now and uh this year as everyone is fully aware it's been a very weird and strange year we do have three wolves that live at our center that we call our ambassador wolves our teacher wolves and typically when we have our full programming going um these are the three wolves that we guarantee visitors would get a chance to see so those three wolves include this wolf right here his name is zephyr also includes his sister named aleyowa and of course there's zephyr creeping in the background on her because that's what big brothers do and of course their younger brother named nikai and so these three wolves are what we call our ambassador wolves our teacher wolves these three wolves came to live at our center as tiny little pups we actually hand raised them at our center for the first three months they lived with us and that's primarily so that these wolves would become socialized and socialize just simply means they're still wolves they still have all their natural wild behaviors and instincts the only difference is that they've lost that fear of us so when visitors come to our center these three wolves are not really afraid of people they'll come right up to the fence and that'll give visitors a chance to see what wolves are really all about now the reason that our center exists today a lot of it comes back to stories that we all grew up hearing stories like little red riding hood and all those stories that generally portray the wolf um as a not so nice character that's just eager and out there to eat people and everything in sight and and of course that's quite honestly just not true these stories came over um as europeans came over to the united states a lot of these stories that we're familiar with are actually uh european stories and it turns out that a natural wild wolf's behavior is to actually be afraid of us so despite all these stories wild wolves are afraid of us and that's why we raise those three ambassador wolves to be comfortable so that people actually get a chance to see what wolves are like the rest of the wolves that live with us right now they are primarily wild wolves and they don't want to have anything to do with us even if we brought people up to their enclosures they would be probably the far opposite corner because they are afraid of humans that's uh the result of a lot of bad things that humans have done to wolves in the past now just a couple of basic things to keep in mind average life expectancy for a wolf in captivity is about 12 to 15 years so much like we would expect from a lot of our dogs of course dogs have descended directly from the wolf so that makes perfect sense their average life expectancy in the wild though is a lot shorter than that on average it's only about four to six years even though we think of wolves as top predators there isn't really too much out there in the wild that hunts them wolves have a pretty difficult life for a couple of reasons one of course is that wolves are incredibly territorial they do not like other wolves trespassing in their territories so that's reason one uh reason two of course is human activity and of course reason number three is going to be um the food that they hunt so wolves typically uh pray or look for to eat animals that we call ungulates which are large hoofed mammals things like deer elf moose bison and just about all those animals are significantly larger than wolves are and of course those animals are going to fight back and so that is a pretty dangerous thing for the wolves as well now throughout the entire world there's actually only two different species of wolf and currently with us today we actually have some of both of those wolves living at our center so the one that we're probably most familiar with is the gray wolf now despite their name gray wolves don't actually have to be gray they can be any number of colors they can be white black brown tan gray a mix of those colors they get that name from a secondary coat when you guys start to watch those webcams in a little bit you're going to notice that some of our wolves have different colors to them but they're really looking big and fluffy right now and that's because they have this winter coat that they've grown out and for most of our wolves that's going to keep them comfortable in temperatures of about negative 30 degrees so it's starting to cool down these next couple of days and that's a great thing for the wolves it's going to make them incredibly happy yesterday for instance i guess the day before we've had temperatures in the 70s and these wolves have their full winter coats on and that's really uncomfortable imagine if you were wearing your full winter gear on a day where it's 70 degrees you wouldn't want to be outside so the wolves are looking for that colder weather no matter what color their outer coat is that undercoat they're frozen that winter coat is always going to be gray and that's where they get the name gray wolf from gray wolves today exist here in north america they exist in europe asia and historically in northern africa the second species of wolf is called the red wolf and the red wolf is uh only native here to primarily the east coast of the united states so southern new york typically is the most northern part of their historic range down the east coast into eastern texas today the red wolf is actually a critically endangered species it's estimated there's only about 250 ish left in the entire world of the red wolf and that's both in the wild and in captivity so truly critically endangered today so we do have red wolves living here with us today those ambassador wolves zephyr alaiwa nikaya i just told you about they are a type of gray wolf or a subspecies of gray wolf called the rocky mountain gray wolf that's the type of wolf you would find out in yellowstone national park in those surrounding states and then we also have living with us today the mexican gray wolf and so the mexican gray wolf is a subspecies of gray wolf as well and it is also endangered uh there's only around 400 of them left in the entire world today again that includes both in the wild and in captivity so our mission here their purpose is sort of twofold one of course doing these education programs education outreach primarily with those three ambassador wolves and then every mexican gray wolf that lives here and every red wolf that live here they are here as part of a federal recovery program that recovery program is called a species survival program or ssp for short and these programs are in place to help recover these two specific types of wolf and so those recovery programs have two main goals one of course is reintroduction into the wild and the second goal is captive breeding so around 1973 with the passing of the endangered species act around that point in time there were only about 14 red wolves left in the entire world and seven mexican gray wolves left in the entire world they were brought into captivity and these recovery programs which started with those last remaining individuals and so we have to be uh very careful about growing their numbers because they are so closely related so that captive breeding is a very important aspect of the recovery programs and then again the eventual reintroduction of these types of wolves into the wild so that's a little bit about what we're do what we do here at our center on our website nywolf.org and that should be down in the chat as well you'll find a lot of additional information you'll find some additional activities you guys in just a little bit are going to be using some of our live web cameras to sketch from you have access to those live cameras 24 7. those cameras are running all the time sometimes we do have people that log on to those cameras move them around so you might see some different angles today it's a rainy day so some of those wolves are going to be hunkered down inside of their dens which is pretty cool as well we have cameras inside of most of our dens on site as well we also have a series of live webinars so we have experts in various fields that come on and talk about specifically what their projects are what they're working on we actually have one webinar tonight at six o'clock a list of those webinars can be found on our website if you want to go back and watch any previous ones we also have a youtube channel all those are posted on there and then we also have a very active facebook page as well and that has things ranging from uh wolf news uh we we post live facebook facebook live videos on there as well some some unique videos of our ambassador wolves primarily um and then the other thing too is we also use that as a platform um so if there is something if there's a petition or if there's a com public comment period for something politically relating to wolves we'll have all that information a link to all that information on our facebook page and that'll allow you as an individual to actually write a letter that will automatically be addressed to your representatives instead of signing on to a math petition like a lot of other organizations do the way that we format it is that the letter would come directly from you as a separate comment instead of them all getting grouped together in one and so that's kind of a real benefit to helping for those public comment periods so that's pretty much it um as far as what i wanted to share with you guys if we do have a couple of questions um we can certainly get to those i don't want to hold you guys up for too long yeah thank you so much alex um this is great for us to learn about wolves um i didn't realize there were so many that were critically endangered so it's really great that you're doing this work and letting us know and the live cams sound pretty exciting so i have a few questions here um let's see so someone is asking is there a particular time of year that the wolves um i guess maybe are are breeding and how many wolves are boring each year and i'm suspecting maybe we're talking about the endangered ones and how fast that recovery is happening yeah great questions so um there is a particular breeding season for wolves so there's a lot of similarities between wolves and dogs again because dogs have descended directly from the wolf however there's also some significant differences so breeding season we're actually coming up to it it's typically going to be about january february gestation for wolves is a very short 63 days and then pups are going to be born typically in april or may um litter size can be anywhere from one to ten pumps and um of course we want to grow their numbers the tricky part is again so when you start with only 14 red wolves or seven mexican grills after a couple generations everyone becomes very closely related to each other and so it really becomes a delicate balance of um these recovery programs do things the old-fashioned way through arranged marriages essentially and so we'll put wolves together that are most distantly related to each other and hope they fall in love and have pups the biggest factors that sort of limit us on this is available space in captivity so we the amount of wolves that we can release into the wild is limited but also we only have limited space in captivity and so we can't just you know put every wolf together and maximize their numbers um so that gets that makes things a little bit on the tricky side as well so this year we at this center we are going to have uh one potential breeding pair it's a pair of red wolves they do have a uh two live cameras they've got a live camera in their enclosure and then a separate one in their den um so when you guys go and look at the live cameras later on um that enclosed you're gonna look at uh their wolves names are lava and tyke and so that's the pair um that will be our breeding pair this year um but real quick off of that the other thing that we have done in the past is artificial insemination um again with the wolves being so closely related to each other sometimes it's just not feasible to move one wolf from one center to another and so that is going to be a factor as well um typically in past years we have we have done that um this year with all this crazy coveted stuff all that has been put on hold so there's no artificial inseminations this year it's been very unsuccessful you could say uh despite how common it is for dogs um it's just not as effective with wolves there's a lot of suspected reasons for that but um there won't be any of that happening this year thank you alex um there's a there's a question about like reintroduction so are there i'm suspecting you you have to be thoughtful about where they're reintroduced and find out the folks that are around if there's any um support or um you know any concerns about reintroducing a wolf to parts of the united states that don't have wolves right now and whether you release them as a pack um yeah so it's a lot of aspects to the release so um we don't personally make those decisions we can make recommendations um however the recovery programs for both the red wolf and the mexican gray wolf are through u.s fish and wildlife service so ultimately they are the ones who are going to make those calls as it currently stands there isn't really uh the red wolf recovery program is uh to use the federal wording for it is under if re-evaluation um in other words at this point in time there aren't really any um reintroductions happening of red wolves which is quite a shame um it is part of the recovery program that they are supposed to be doing that um and that's a whole bunch of primarily political red tape that's been going on since 2015 essentially is when the program went under re-evaluation um so that's for the red wolf mexican gray wolves historically have been released in new mexico arizona there have been some that have been released back down into mexico as well um when they're released in the past sometimes we've done it as a pack but like i mentioned before um there's only limited space in wolves being territorial there's only so many different packs we can have out in the wild at once um and so last year we actually participated we actually got one of our pups out into the wild last year through what's called a cross foster and so that's when you take pups at a very young age that are born in captivity you can bring them out to a wild den that has pups of about the same age and you simply add your additional pup from captivity into the wild and that pup then grows up as a wild wolf and so that's potentially a good way to get some different genetic diversity out into the wild population as well so that's that's one way of doing that you guys may have heard it was just on the ballots as well um colorado had on their on their ballots if they wanted to reintroduce wolves into the state that did pass which is great news um so that's sort of the newest reintroduction potential area um there's just sort of a couple questions about what's going to happen with that that was just simply a should we or should we not um and so now the question then becomes okay cool what type of wolf how are we gonna do this um technically it's possible for mexican gray wolves to extend up into colorado and that would be great because we do need more space for them um it's questionable if they were historically there though and so they might move in wolves from like the yellowstone region for instance which are not um as endangered so there's a lot to see about what might go on there but they did make the first step and that was voting in favor of wolferi introduction to the state that's awesome news thank you alex um i want to be mindful of your time and i also noticed that on your website i want to let people know there's a great learn tab with lots of faqs um questions um or facts about the different types of wolves that are there so i think that's a good place for the for folks to go to learn more about butt wolves and your center yes and then also i am putting my email address in the chat as well so if you guys do have any other questions it's just alex nywolf.org so if you have any additional questions you're more than welcome to email me at any time with those questions and i can either point you in the right direction or uh get your response thank you so much alex and also just real quick you guys are going to be looking at some of the webcams shortly most of our enclosure sizes um range from about an acre and a half to two and a half acres um so when you log onto the webcams you may or may not see anything at that given time they do have quite a bit of space to move around that's certainly small for what they would have in the wild but as far as captive enclosure space um an acre and a half to two and a half acres is is a pretty good size so if you don't see them on the camera right then and there don't give up um they move quite a bit through the enclosures great thank you very much alex oh no problem thank you guys so much hey we we really appreciate you coming on um and talking to us we also really appreciate the work that you're doing to help preserve and protect uh wolves around the world um so great work awesome thank you so much i also want to encourage people to check out more of the work of the wolf conservation center both for educational resources and um uh contributions to them will also help uh with the uh the the wolf conservation work that they do thank you so much absolutely i want to show you folks a few tricks about drawing wolves and then we're going to jump over to the wolf cams that they have at the wolf conservation center and the uh so this is we're going to do just um an initial kind of quick look at some strategies for blocking in the major parts of the wolf and we'll be primarily looking at the at a side view and then on top of that we're going to we're going to think a little bit about how do you um how do you how do you how do you handle the fur and the fur texture on a wolf um the pelt of a wolf is really really interesting there are these sections of fur we've studied birds and we know about the excuse me the feather groups in the birds um so in the on the wolves there'll be these sections of fur that also have a fur direction and it makes for specific patterns and often dark marks on the fur of the wolf which we can look for and we can see so without further ado i'm going to jump over to the webcam here um oh hey april oh could you scoot that way just a little bit thanks hun um this is the wolf worksheet and i've got a couple of skeletons here of of wolves and i am going to use these to um to look at how i kind of go about blocking in the basic shapes and patterns um on on a wolf so here's the skeleton oh and by the way so if you don't haven't printed this out yet go to the top of the chat there's a link there you can get this worksheet and print it out or you can draw your own so when i'm thinking about drawing the wolf body what i do is i think about breaking it up initially into three sections so the chunk of its body here we'll do with the head and the legs in just a moment for the body here of the wolf i think of an area over here covering the shoulder blade and the upper leg right and you can kind of think of this as sort of a bent lima bean all right sort of a zone in like that i made this a little bit too sticky-outy in front of the arm bone here so the meat that covers this sort of makes this blobby shape now what about back here in the hips the hips and the thigh here um they are going to create so think of these as as creating a big sort of box over this area here and then the belly of the wolf um they get shaggier in winter slimmer in summer but think of that as as a little kind of unit in between these two so very quickly when i'm sketching a wolf you know on the body there's a front oval there is a central body oval and then there's that one for the hips so you've got these one two three sections and those can correspond to the upper legs the belly and the hind quarters of the wolf for the head we're going to be simplifying that in our heads as a ball with a box sticking out of it and when that's looking towards you we think of it as a ball with a three-dimensional box sticking out of it the neck is fairly thick they've got a thick muscular neck but there's also just sort of a big there's a lot of fur in there so you can think of this essentially as a cylinder a thick cylinder connecting those areas the tail on wolves is not as big and bushy as you get on a fox but they still have a substantial tail and the tail is interesting in wolves like you know dogs like to wag their tails up and all around you'll very often see the tail sort of sticking down a little bit more on on wolves for the legs the front leg comes down as a post you notice that you've got your forearm here getting to your hand so what you're going to see is this is going to come down straight and then there can be a slight dip out slight sort of change in thickness right when you get to that foot so the front leg is a big post the back leg has this angle in it so from where you go from the knee you don't really usually see the knee sticking down you're going to see the back part of this leg coming out and turning a corner there's an a forward facing angle so this is its heel its foot we've got this little angle here so very quickly back on this thing your front leg is coming down as a post your back leg is coming down and has that little corner in it right there that's the heel sticking up and as you can see from this you actually have a hip the knee is in line with the body in here also note that if you kind of get into this a little bit more you'll notice that the wrist is lower than the heel so that gives that front leg just a big long straight section big long straight section so it's not doing this you're not here's your body you're not having the leg coming down and then the foot coming forward like that at the same point that you have your back leg doing that this point here that's going to be much lower if you totally miss this little change in angle here at the wrist it won't really affect your drawings that much sides might be some grass right there so that's just kind of a quick block in the body idea all right now i'm going to get a little bit more sophisticated on this lower one here and what we're going to do is we're going to take these basic ideas that we've blocked in here and we're going to turn it into sort of the the the meat on the critter so i'm going to lightly kind of draw over the head here i'm going to have my my head my neck is going to come down this is sort of what the meat would be doing inside here on the shoulder blade the shoulder blade is going to have sort of a lump in this area and then see how the the the the forearm cuts back like this that means that you're going to come back like this to the elbow here if you push your page up just a little bit jack thank you thank you all right the back runs without fur on it sort of along the edge of the spine here on the leg the meat of this leg is going to come and occupy this upper area the meat on the lower leg narrows and the meat on the foot is even more skinny the feet are going to come out basically flat so we're not going to be doing this sort of lion thing where your toes kind of kick up at an angle we're going to come out flat on these feet here your belly if you were without fur would be tucking in somewhere like this but we're going to actually have a lot of fur on this so this is this is kind of what's going on underneath the hood and i'm now going to um we're going to flesh this little thing out so i'm going to switch over to a pen here and i'm going to start putting in um putting in some uh some more details um the take a look you've got your eye socket in there wolves will have this wonderful yellow eye from the side you are looking at you're kind of you're going to be looking in at this i made my eye all dark we'll just have to deal with that but you'll get these sort of wonderful yellow iris and a lot of a lot of wolves they'll have a sloppy forehead and the nose comes out past where you see those bones are there's a cartilage little cartilage section out there the nose pad on wolves is really broad so when you look at it from the front you're going to have a big nose all right um and from the side here could you adjust your page a little bit please oh i think i have to well since i enlarged i have to all right so down below my snout we're gonna have a little bit of a whisker bed in this area of the wolf's face and its mouth we're going to kind of come out and down and we're going to go to kind of a little ball out here very often the kind of the corner of dog's mouths you see a little bit of their black lips showing through could you slide the page up just a tad i think i'd probably better zoom out otherwise oops otherwise i'm gonna i'm gonna keep it like i'm gonna be drawing this down here all right so and then out where the corner of that mouth is you'll often see that the the skin is gonna kind of ball down there to sort of have a place for that now the fur is going to connect underneath the head here and there's going to be a really big rough of thick neck fur that we'll get on our wolf the ear attaches approximately here in the skull and um then sticks up on top of the head so the ears on wolves are shorter than what we're used to seeing on our dogs so people tend to draw the the wolf ears much too big so i'm going to have this little kind of blunt ear sticking up here and i'm gonna have also keep this sort of thick on the back side because hey it's winter time a little bit of my winter coat now let's put a little bit of pattern in here on the head there is a zone of sort of heavier tissue below the eye and above the eye that is often white and that sort of places the eye into the head and so you also want to kind of leave it as this sort of white zone that you'll see above and around the eye and going back from the eye there's a little ridge that is going to connect with sort of down down down here and i'm going to bring this line all the way down across here as sort of a heavier unit of fur in this area so this zone that is coming off here on the side view i'm going to kind of you look at your wolf from the front that's what's making this these sort of cheek areas that stick out all right so that's we're getting a little bit of that right in here i'm going to come up over the back of the wolf here and i often just put on my sort of back line just a few little kind of tick marks in that like that that just implies that it's a little bit of fluffy fur over the shoulders so there there's remembers i mentioned these sort of zones of fur on the wolf all right that's what i'm going to get into now so um we can think of like sort of pieces of a raincoat you know here's piece number one this next piece is going to fit here over our shoulders and we're going to kind of come here out to a little off into a little point here by the elbow and right here over the back there's this sort of extra this is kind of an odd wolfy thing but there's this extra pad of hair that you'll see right in here in this area the edge of which is often kind of has a little bit of a dark tinge on it so we're going to have this little wedge of the the fur that goes back here over the back in here in the armpit area there's sort of a zone of lighter kind of fluffier longer fur and where the front leg rubs on the belly here you'll see a bit of the same thing so the zone of kind of less guard hairs and more you see the dense under fur in these areas on the wolf here and here oops i'm making my wolf way too skinny sorry i was seeing that belly line and bringing that to my end of my wolf i need to remember that with the fur on here we're going to come down like this there we go there we are all right now we've got a now we've got a a thicker pelt on our wolf all right so this wolf it's fur goes down past its belly so you tickle its tummy there's me a lot of nice yummy fur in here so it can lie down on the snow not get its tummy cold our back leg on the back side of the leg there is really long fur right in here so i can kind of have a suggestion of really long fur in there that makes that back leg look beefier and then the fur on the legs themselves is shorter hair so when you're looking at the foot from the side you might see sort of a side view of these toes you might see the nails sticking in the front and on the front leg here maybe a little angle change in here this is going to slope down to here then we're coming into this part of the leg with our big foot there so wolves have big kind of floppy feet here's my tail dangling down now if i put a little bit of patterns in with this i'm putting a few kind of generic wolfy dark and light spots on this and that's going to make this make this guy look a little bit more wolfy and then we'll jump over to our our document cameras so um i am going to use some gray paint here again there's lots of different colors you'll see in wolves there's ones that are all black all white really brown i'm mixing up a little bit of gray here and i am going to get it dark across the bridge of the nose behind the white spot up here i'm going to make this dark as well i should have left a little bit of white there in front of the ears i'm going to put a gray into here and bring that across into the front here i'm going to put a little bit of gray across the saddle here over its back onto its rump and going down the back edge of the tail now i'm going to mix a little bit more brown in with this test my colors and i'm going to bring a little bit i think i want a little bit of a warmer brown a little brown here down onto the side of the body middle of the leg here some wolves will have this nice sort of lighter color like not maybe as pale as you as as brown as you get in a coyote but you can have that the top of the nose be brown you can have the back of the ears be brown you can have brown washes kind of coming into the there and the final little piece that i'm going to do is i'm going to add in a few little dark accents where the long guard hairs are kind of longer and and and exposed you can get these sort of these dark accents on the sides of the body of the wolf so sometimes you will oh and maybe i want just going to put a little bit of dark right here underneath the eye here there we go so now i'm going to put in a few little dark accents and we'll get to the webcam so here are some dark accents sometimes you'll see right in this let's start up here by oh the head is still drying so i'll start here on the on the on the shoulder sometimes where the this this cape that comes down the neck sometimes in here you'll get a little bit of a dark edge sometimes a little bit of a dark edge right in here from those guard hairs this little strange patch on the back makes a nice reliable little backwards facing v sometimes in the middle of the leg here in this area you will also get a little bit of those guard hairs making a little dark mark coming down there similarly in the front here of this leg you'll get those guard hairs can make a little dark accent and you can get the similar thing going on on the back edge of the leg there on the tail right about in here those guard hairs make a little black spot high on the tray the tail that you can see especially from behind and then also the tip of the tail will be black coming around the front of the body here you sometimes get you can get this being kind of coming into a so that it kind of almost looks like it has a collar and on the head itself sometimes coming around the bottom edge of this going a little bit into that line on the side of the head that will make a nice little wolfie mark so that allows you to you can look for sort of some base coat of color model that with some browns then look for those dark accent lines where you get those sorts of things in and you've got a wolf generally in proportions heavy body you have a thick neck you have long legs and um so looking at at those sorts of features you can get something that will feel a little bit more like a wolf

Channel: John Muir Laws

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Id: EaQXuYF0iH8

Length: 48min 34sec (2914 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020