Draw Fluffy - the Three Headed Dog
J. K. Rowling borrowed an ancient Greek myth of a Three-Headed
Dog for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
He was originally known as Cerberus, and
he guarded the gates of Hades to keep living people
out.
The Greek version also had the tail of
a serpent, a detail that J. K. Rowling did not
include, (although it does make a cool picture in my mind).
You'll also be happy to know that the original Three-Headed
Dog could be soothed with music...
To read more about this ancient mythological
creature, go to http://www.loggia.com/myth/cerberus.html.
Now, let's learn how to draw a magical
Three-Headed dog!
 For
my picture, I decided to leave off the serpent tail, (or
lizard or dragon tail, depending on the telling of the story,)
and show Cerberus in his reincarnation as Fluffy.
When I started the research for this chapter, I thought
it would be easy. Silly me.
It did start out easy, anyway. My father, C. K. Havekost,
sent me his photo of Toka, an English Staffordshire Terrier
who lived with my parents for many years. Toka was
a real sweetheart, and had no fierceness in him at all.
But I really think he looks the part of the three-headed
dog. That's his picture at the top of the page.
Like I said, that was the easy part.
Toka does look mildly irritated because someone is taking
his picture, but a mildly irritated Fluffy wouldn't scare
anyone away from the trapdoor and the Sorcerer's Stone,
(or away from the Gates of Hell, either). He has to look
mean. He needs to be aggressive. He has to show some
teeth.
So I went to Google.com, clicked the "image"
button, and typed in "dog growling." No luck.
Then I tried "dog growl," "canine growl,"
"canine facial expressions," "angry dog,"....
Lots of pictures of sports teams and beer cans, and lots
of snarling tigers for some reason. (I did find a site that
sells a book on how to get a job as a "decoy"
for police dog training. The "decoy" gets to pretend
to be the bad guy so the dogs can practice attacking him.
No thanks.)
Then I tried "dog snarl" and got lucky, and found
a great picture on a site from England that showcased puppets
used in movies. Unfortunately, that website is no longer
available, so you'll need to search for a picture to use.
I did read, while doing the research for this chapter,
that an angry dog will keep it's eyes wide open (showing
lots of white), unless it's a wimpy dog. Wimps have squinty
eyes when they're snarling. So I've paid lots of attention
to the teeth and mouth in the photo, but will draw the eyes
open and staring.
 No
one ever accused the Three-Headed Dog of being a wimp!
It just goes to show you that sometimes the research takes
longer than the drawing. But it's very important to keep
looking for the perfect model. It will really make your
drawings special.
OK, now let's get to work.
For a body, we can use this crouching dog. And to help
us with the different poses of Fluffy's three heads, I flipped
the photo of Toka on my scanner.
It will be easier to draw our three heads if we see where
the basic proportions are. Look at the drawings below, and
see how the eyes fall on a horizontal center line, and how
we can fix the position of the ears by drawing a line from
the nose back at an angle through the eye. This really helps
us make our first sketch.
Now we have enough basic information to start
our first rough drawing. We will need to draw a skeleton
first, so that we can see how this mythical beast attaches
all those heads to the top of his spine. (If he gets a headache,
will all three heads hurt?)
Now it's getting fun!
We now begin our final drawing by putting
on the outline of the dog's body. We very quickly find out
that the hard part of drawing a Three-headed dog is not
putting on the heads, but finding room for all those necks!
We're trying to put three things in a place where one thing
really goes, at least in the real world. But if we put two
of the necks behind one of the heads, it will look OK.
 I
have occasionally made small clay figures to help me make
a drawing come out right, but in this case I decided not
to. It's an option you might keep in mind, though, in case
you ever get really stumped with a drawing.
 I've
had to make several copies of my drawing, because when I
followed my skeleton sketch exactly I found that the heads
were too small, and the necks were too long. I traced the
body on a clean sheet of paper, then drew the heads again.
I think the result is much better.
We still have no snarl, no growl, no teeth.
It's now time to go to the website you found with a snarling
dog
picture.
You can open it up on your browser window,
then disconnect your Internet connection. That way, if you
have a modem connection, you won't be tying up the phone
line too long.
We have to decide which head will have the
most teeth showing, since we don't want them all to have
the same expression. That would be boring. Since the head
on the lower left is closest to the position of the dog
in the picture, I picked that one.
Ooh, now that's more like it. All we need now is some shading
to make him look more solid, and we'll be done. All of the
photographs we're using have the light source coming from
different directions, so we'll have to figure out the shadows
by ourselves.
And...Ta Dah!
You men may want to add some drool, tear up
a few ears (does he bite himself by accident?) show a little
more teeth. This is one that we can really play with. And
you might even want to add that serpent tail, to see how
what Cerberus looked like. I'll bet it would be pretty dramatic!
You might also want to learn how to draw these critters...
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