Drawing the pigmy goats at Blacker Hall Farm reminds me of the two-minute pose warm-up drawing at the start of a life-drawing class.
The only poses that do last marginally longer are when the goats are feeding on hay but unfortunately that means their heads are hidden in the feeder. Eventually one or two of them settle down, but they’re easily distracted.
The most dynamic poses are when the goats are grooming or scratching themselves. They can scratch the back of their necks by leaning their heads back to use the tips of their backwards-curving horns or they can reach almost the same spot with a balletic stretch of a rear leg. Hope we don’t get that one as a warm-up exercise at our Tai Chi class.
There’s a brief bit of head-butting: a larger female putting a smaller goat in its place at the hay feeder. It wasn’t especially aggressive, perhaps more of a social interaction or even an element of play-fighting.
I could collected a whole bunch of accurate information about their appearance by taking photographs this morning, then draw a detailed illustration using the photos as reference but I’ve done a lot of that recently and I need to free up my drawing. I want to try to draw the behaviour of the goats rather than minutely record their appearance.
On the shorter-haired goats, I like the way you can see more of their anatomy. This white one has a structure with the organs of its body suspended from the skeleton.
