Acrylic Painting And Crafty Ideas: Animal Pictures To Paint

Animals and pets are an excellent choice of subjects to use for easy acrylic painting projects. Below is a step by step guide to help you.

Select a picture of your pet or the animal you want to paint. There are a few ideas to use as guidelines of animal pictures to paint below if you don’t have one.

Prepare the surface of what you’re painting on or paint the background in an off-white or light color. Let it completely dry.

Lightly sketch your picture onto the background using watercolor pencils or even better, trace it, then transfer it using graphite paper.

Start to paint your animal by focusing on the large overall shapes and paint them first leaving the details for later. Let it dry.

Go over it with a second layer to deepen the first coating while blending the shapes and colors a little more. Let it dry.

Study the texture of the fur of your animal in the picture before moving on to the next step. Some areas may have fluffy fur, some may be long or short but get an idea in mind of how the fur in the picture looks.

Using your liner brush, paint the details in layers of different shades to make the fur look realistic.

Now using a fine liner brush, put in the details of the face, referring to the picture as a guideline.

Lastly add some depth to it by painting in a background without a lot of details so you don’t take away from the main subject of your picture.

Let me know if you have any questions, comments, tips, advice, or ideas for other easy acrylic painting projects. I’d love to hear them. Please leave them in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

If you'd like to use one of the pictures below for a template, you can right click it and save it to your computer. Then print it out and use graphite paper to lightly transfer it to your painting surface.