The Art Of Animal Drawing by Ken Hultgren

Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-27426-8

As the title suggests, a book on drawing animals. Ken Hultgren was an animator for Disney, the former showing in poses and walk cycles, the latter in some of the "carricature" examples.

Ignoring the preface, here we have 134 pages full of black and white illustrations, with a few explanations thrown in. Quite many of the example drawings are shown as one roughed in and one finished version.

After 18 pages of general notes (the division of the body in three parts, rule of the thumb for placement of eyes and ears, boxing in forms, examples for simplified skeleton and mannikin frames, "mood and feeling", "use of line", and some examples of textures you can achieve with a brush) the book is divided into "chapters" of very varying length devoted to one animal or group of animals each. Nearly all of those have action poses like leaping, and a page or two on carricaturing the animal(s) in question.

The first one, "The Horse Family", goes over 29 pages into most detail, starting with how the different parts of the skeleton are made up and fit together, the assumption being that the reader will be able to apply the same methods to other animals without being walked through all of the steps again. In addition to random action poses throughout the chapter there are sequences on leaping, kicking out, trot and canter. For a bit variety from the "generic horse" there's a page on draft horses and zebras each, as well as a double page on colts.

The 20 pages of "The Cat Family" is mainly devoted to lions, with a page each on Tigers and Domestic Cats.

"The Deer Family" (including stags and fawns) is covered on 9 pages including sequences of walk and jump. It only shows a "generic deer", no note on different species. By contrast, the later chapter "Dogs" of the same length has only a page of random sketches for general information, followed by one or two pages each with sketches of a particular breed. "The Bear Family" and "Elephants"  are similar in page count, with the elephant chapter being noteworthy for a for the species unexpected variation of poses (albeit none "leaping").

Five pages spared for "Cows and Bulls", four for "Kangaroos" (including a jump cycle), three each for rabbits (and a hare which wasn't labelled as such), foxes, pigs and warthogs, and gorillas, two for giraffes, and camels (both, like the elephant, sadly lacking any information about pace, their main or only gait), and a single page on squirrels.

The book is capped by a 7-pages chapter on "Composition and Animal Grouping".

I was slightly disappointed because the title implies more variety than is actually shown; "The Art of Mammal Drawing" would have been more accurate. The "The X Family" chapters are more concerned about showing (presumably) commonalities, rather than going into details of differences between species.

There is nothing like the staple of how to draw humans books, the figure divided into head-heights, so you need to be able to see or measure the proportions from the examples, or photos or models.
On the other hand, I think the many examples of "roughed in" mannikin - simplified skeleton and/or basic shapes - next to a finished image can be very helpful.

In my eyes the greatest strength of the book are the dynamic poses, and particularly the running and jumping sequences.

Considering the low price, this for me was worth it.