Drawing, like anything, can be really frustrating if you don't know the first step to doing what you want. Over the years I found a way that works best for me, and decided I might as well share it with you. I touched on it before in the human face tutorial, so for this I will explain more. I don't usually draw pictures as a whole, I compose them, piece by piece. Learning to draw this way made it much easier for me. So, I have here a very basic drawing of a wolf's head. As you can see, it is composed of very basic shapes like circles, triangles and squares.

So, let's begin with the composure of the head. First things first, draw a circle. You don't have to worry about it being perfectly round, you will erase it eventually anyhow. If you must have it round though, you can use a compass or one of those template rulers that have circles in them you can trace with your pencil.

Next, you should divide up the circle by drawing a line directly down the middle, and a line across the side. You'll notice that I curved my horizontal line. This is because the face is going to be looking downwards. By drawing these lines, you have now set up guidelines for adding the rest of the features as you will see in the next few pictures.

Here, I add 2 triangle shapes to the top for the ears, and a rectangle shape for the muzzle of the wolf. The part that connects to the face must widen out a bit, so remember that.

The next thing you need to do is add the eyes. First look at your guidelines. The line that goes down the center of the head will help you to place the eyes. The line cuts the head into 2 equal halves. So, what you should do is place an eye in the middle of each half. This centers them rather perfectly.

Here comes a tricky part. If you aren't comfortable with doing the curves, then just use the triangles like the example at the very top of this page. You will now draw the jaw fur. This can be done in a curving line, like I've shown here. The key thing to remember, so that you do not have problems with it looking funny, is that the jaw fur line starts from the ear! It starts pretty much right from the center of the ear, and then moves away from the head in a curving downward motion. You will stop the line when you parallel to the top of the muzzle. Here, make a curve that goes close to the muzzle, and then stop the line. It's kind of hard for me to explain, as you can probably tell, but this pic is the best reference really.

If you had trouble with placing the eyes, then here is another method a lot of people use to measure the eye. If you notice, the space between your eyes is actually equal to another eye. So if you drew an eye right in the middle of the head, then drew an eye of the same size on either side, they would be placed evenly. You can also see that the space between your eye and the side of your head is in fact equal to an eye as well. Try it, you'll be suprised.

Now that you have the wolf's head done, you can go in and add some details if you feel comfortable with it.

Erase the circle you made at the beginning, and any other lines that shouldn't be there. You can now also go in and add detail to the ear. If you can't really get it right, an easy way to make the ear is to just draw another "ear" inside of the original one.

Try curving some of the lines a bit to make it more "organic" looking.

Add a few zigzags to simulate a furry look near the neck, since a wolf's fur is longer on it's neck.

For the bottom jaw, you can add a half-circle, it's as easy as that.

Finally, for the nose, a simple circle or a rounded square shape will do.

The last thing for you to do is make a fur pattern. Most wolves have very similar patterns, and I've drawn it here for you to practice with. It's not really something I can describe how to draw in words. It's more like coloring actually. I would reccommend saving this picture to your hard drive and drawing it several times until you memorize the pattern, so you do not have to look at this picture anymore. Beyond that, the best reference are pictures of actual wolves. If you need some, try these sites:

http://members.aol.com/wolfpark/Page1.html

http://animals.timduru.org/view/Animals/wolf

http://www.clcookphoto.com/wolves.htm

If you want to know how to do parts of the head (like the eyes, ears, and nose) then please press BACK on your browser and go to the other tutorials I've set up for them. Press NEXT to continue with this tutorial and learn how to draw the head from the side.