Have Fun Drawing Cats: Combine structure and knowledge with a loose, casual style.

1. About This Class: Hi, I'm Steve Worthington. I'm a storyboard artist, illustrator, and sculptor. Over the years, I've drawn literally thousands of storyboards for everything you can think of, including cat food brands. Besides that, I've also sculpted a bunch of cats, some of them in the form of jewelry, and also a bronze cuda. In this class, you're going to learn the essential key structures so that you'll be able to confidently draw awesome looking cats will combine a loose, lively approach, but it will have the underpinnings of solid knowledge. We will take a look at anatomy and besides that will also break a cat down into its very simplest components using a kind of wireframe approach. That way you'll be able to convey the feeling of the cat with the movement and the pose. We'll also take a look at the limbs and how they function in a very controlled way. Everyone knows how twisty and bendy and flexible cats are. So we'll spend a bit of time taking a look at that, also, how they're so good at landing on their feet. We will take a look at proportions and how you change those and you get a completely different cat, overlapping shapes. That's another very important thing to get the hang of simplifying things like the head. You can get nearly all the way there with the minimal means. Then you can go in and be more specific. If you want to be able to draw cats from memory. That's a good aspiration. And we'll also take a look at the difference between tracing cats and copying them. These are just stepping stones on the way to being able to draw them from memory. Whether it's realistic cats or Goofy cartoon cats you're interested in drawing. There's definitely a lot of good stuff in this class for you. Well, a lot of this class is pretty serious. It's all leading to a lot of fun. So if you want to draw a more believable, lively, and personality filled cats, I'll see you in class. 2. Materials: So what did we draw with? Well, anything you are comfortable with. I mean, it could be a pencil, Apple pencil. Anything that you're comfortable drawing with is fine. When it comes to what are we draw on? Well, paper's always a good start. Tracing paper is also perfectly fine. The point is, if you're comfortable making marks with it, then that's what you should use. Actually, if you are going completely traditional, tracing paper is a definite useful thing for working out your shapes over the tops of other things. So get yourself some tracing paper if you don't already have any. And let's get scribbling. 3. Structure: So let's talk about cap structure. And the least you need to know. We have a very flexible spine and some hips that are attached to the spine. And the spine and continues off into the tail. We have a squashed ball for a head, which has a little snail, the bid on the front. We have the front leg structures which when it's facing this way, would be kind of a sort of S shape. So you've got the scapula and the upper and the lower arm, and the foot. We have the ribcage, which will start about here. And that's a fairly squash shape. We've got the back, back legs which start on the hip area and I'll do it more three-quarter view and I'm in a moment. So we've got the thigh, we got the knee, the lower leg, and then the long long foot, the toes on the end, the thigh, and long part of the foot when it's standing or walking or running, usually mirror each other. Is here. This is the basis for your cat. Will indicate the opposite side legs. So we'd have a scapula, shoulder in about the same place. We could have this leg getting a little more forward. And likewise with the back leg, we can have a little more forward things to note, the back leg of a cat as well as the front leg there. They're usually when it's standing anyway, very crouch. So they're not they're not like straight like a person's leg. If a cat's leg was straight up and down like a person's leg, it would stand a little taller. But they don't at least I don't for the most part. And then we've got the eye kind of going in around here. And how that affects the silhouette. You have usually a bump somewhere around where the shoulder blades or you got your neck? And there's the nose, there's big cheeks. Don't forget the big cheeks and the neck that comes down to where the shoulders on either side of the neck joins the ribcage. And we've got the just fluffed out a lot. So you've got muscles in here. We're getting into some basic anatomy in a little while. But you can see how these internal shapes and structures inform the overall shape of a cat. Tails a little bit long there. Shorten that up a little bit. And you've got the leg muscles which fill out this. This is the bone really. So this shape of the thigh is much thicker and It's like a flat thick shape. Is wide in this direction and not so wide in that direction. So we can see how overall these underlying structures inform our drawing of a cat. I made this little simple shape to emphasize the three most important parts. When you're first sketching out your cat to bear in mind relative to each other. There's the long flexible spine and the squashed ball for a head, which just stuck on the front there. The ribcage in the middle. This should be a little squishy. This is very hard. But the rib cage is kind of somewhat squishy on a cat. And this should be pretty hard because that's a bony pelvis, so no squashing is there but all these skinny little ribs that make up the ribcage, they do flex and squash quite a bit. And the neck, quite often it's called an S curve in it, like this. So if we're looking at our cat, often the neck is like this, and the back is quite often sort of arched. When the cats running, it can stretch itself out. I wouldn't bend it too far back in this direction, knowing just a little bit past a straight line. But it can really like close up this way. If you're drawing a cat running, you can really flex it in that direction and extend it like, like I said, not too much further than a straight line. Here's a quick look at three main body shapes. And in our scapula, shoulder blades would kind of go back here. And then the front legs will come down here. And then the back legs would zig-zag in this direction. Just to quickly compare that to a person. If the cat was standing up straight towards us. This would be the ribcage of a person, as you can see, wider than it is thick from front-to-back. And the pelvis is very enlarged because its job is to hold up the whole body on the back, two legs. So it's a different different kettle of fish. They're always good to compare cat shapes or any animal shapes to humans. If you know what a human it looks like. Here's a simplified cat, once again, have sort of a strip representing the spine. And not only can it bend quite a lot in this direction, there is a certain amount of flex side to side as well. And it can twist. So you can really get some movement out of the spine. And again, the ribcage, It's not that big. I mean, compared to a dog is smaller relative to the overall body size. And it's again a little squishy. And we have the slightly squashed ball shape for the head with the muzzle on the front. And here's the very simplified wireframe representation of the legs. Although I've got a point for the knee here and a point for the shoulders here. In reality, the bone curves and that's more of a sort of a curve shape there. But for the sake of just plotting things quickly. Thinking in terms of these points is very useful. And also the two scapula is the shoulder blades. Here. I've just kind of linked them together into a loop, just so that when you're sketching things out, you can just connect one side to the other. But you know, in reality that they're separate structures. But this is the basis of your cat. If you I guess I need to put the pelvis in the backend of the I've incorporated it into the backend of the spine and taken the tail off as a little bit of a separate thing. Whichever way you do it is fine as long as you know that you've got this very flexible strip that represents the spine and these other structures. And you can just play around with those and just look on cats for those shapes. And try and develop a sense where you're seeing beyond the inside the cat. And I'll show you in a number of photographs, will draw over them and we'll identify and sketch over the top all these shapes so that we know what we're looking for when we're drawing real cats. A slightly more three-dimensional look at the legs shows that there's sort of flat ish, wider in this direction for the thigh especially. But think of them as a two-dimensional shape. Same deal here with the, with the front leg. This is the scapula area. This is the upper arm, this is the forearm. And then we've got the foot down the bottom there. And I'll say it a million times because it bears repeating that the long back foot is usually parallel to the thigh and the scapula is more or less usually parallel to the forearm. And we just add fluff over the top. Bunch of muscles and skin and fur. But you should definitely familiarize yourself with these key points. Ankles, elbows, shoulders, knees, the hip area, which very often is curved because of the flexibility of the spine, kind of underneath the backend, especially if the cat's like sitting down or maybe I should say sitting up when they sit down with their front legs up and down, and the back legs all kind of bunched up. And these underlying structures really are the key to drawing dynamic, lively looking cats that are believable because you've put these little bumps and things in places that you understand them to be. And then it just adds, adds a layer of realism to even a very cartoony looking cat. And there's our first cat. Taking a look at that, I'd be inclined to put it a little more more fair in there. 4. Wireframe Structure Over Photos: Okay, So let's find a wireframe type forms in here. I would say that the pelvis would be hitting in a direction like that. And the spine. And the spine extends into the tail. And the shoulders are pretty pushed up towards the head there. And then the ribcage area in here. So for our forearm and then our upper arm and then the scapula, It's just not really seeing it because the upper arm is in the way, but it would be kinda back in there. And for this front slash leg, forum, upper arm, shoulder area. And then the scapula would basically become a heading back in that direction, but we're not seeing it. And the ball for the head. I can put out center line in there. This little extended bit. News and its mouth. And the back legs would come from the hip, from the from the pelvis. We have a main part of the foot. And then the knee would be in here and then the rest of the upper leg, femur thighbone would be in that direction. And with the other leg, there's the main part of the foot. And you can easily locate the direction of the thigh bone. And you can easily locate that. You can easily locate the direction of the thigh bone because it usually is pretty closely matching the long part of the foot on the back leg. Especially if it's bearing weight, if it's kind of laying around and it's all flopped out, that's not necessarily the case. But I think we could call that the back legs and the front foot just kinda round like that. So yeah, we can just finish out these feet a little bit. Put the eyes in for the head. Why not throw some ears on there as well while we're at it? Then we can take a look without the photograph. Then we can recognize our shapes. Now this is a very flopped out asleep cat. And it's just surprising how flat to the ground all the various body parts become very thin and wide. Let's try another one. This one's in an interesting pose. Might as well start with the head, since that's right, they're putting the ascender line. And then we can start looking for the other shapes. Now we might as well start with the spine, since we can see it's back here, arched up here and it goes down over there. And then the pelvic area would be in here so that the size would be kin around there and there. And then so we need to also figure out where the where the ribcage would go. So I would put the spine going down a little further. Here. You will kind of go down and come up again underneath the head. The rib cage would be down in here. We can see the back legs fairly clearly. We can assume that the back foot is about there. So if this is the long part of the foot, we can assume that the thigh bone is about the same angle as that, then that just leaves the the lower leg calf area other side. Not sure what I'm seeing too much around here. I'm gonna go with something like that. That's all hidden by all this shrubbery. So I think the forearm would take us to the elbow here and about here. So the shoulder going to be around here. And on this side, it's the upper arm is obscuring. And then the scapula would be up in here somewhere behind the head. And on this side over here. We can put the feet in there. Take a look at that without the photograph. It's fun to try and guess where things go as well. So since we're not seeing the photograph now, I would put the ears. Maybe here. We can pop the photograph back on and see how wrong I am. Quite wrong here and here. So it was a fair bit wrong there. So we can just put the ears in where they should be. But I've learned something there so I can bear in mind that these are fairly close together compared to where I thought they were and little further forward and further up the head. But this is how you learn your way through things. You overdraw things. You look at the things without the reference and then draw some things in where you think they'd be. And then look at the reference again. And that's how you realize what your assumptions are and how they differ from the reality of it. So that's just the process for improving your understanding of a thing. This cat is lying down. So let's start with what we can see clearly first, which would be the ball for the head. So there's a head, put a center line in. And we can see pretty clearly where the scapula would go in the upper arm and the elbow back here. And on the other side, shoulder would be in here. Scapula will be behind all of this. The spine looks like it's kind of up on its side Around here. So we could put our hips in there. And we would have a spring going in this direction, kind of going around the back. So twisting to a certain extent. And then the spine of its neck curl under here and join into the underside of its head. And then the ribcage be around here. And we can put in there long part of the foot and the thigh, matching the heading in similar directions. Not always the case when it's just flopped out, but more so when it's got weight-bearing on these on those legs, but it's a pretty reliable indicator. If you can see where the long part of the back foot is, you get a pretty good idea of where the thigh is going to be because it's pretty much lined up with that. Likewise with the forearm and the scapula at the front end. So that usually matches pretty closely this scapula here. So we can just draw in this front feet and those bank fee. And the spine extends into the tail. And I'm going to have a go at drawing in the eyes and ears again without, without the reference. So I'm going to put the ears, let's say put the I is in here and put the ears in here. And if I get this horribly wrong, then I'll learn something. And if I don't well, then I guess I already learned something. Okay. Well, I bit too big. Ear placement. That's pretty good. This one could be a little further back. Let's put that in a different color so that I can see where I'm going wrong. So there's an I think there's another eye there. And from what I can tell, let me turn this off for a second. There's the ear or the ear. Yeah, I mean, not, not too horrible. But still learned a thing. I have a tendency to make eyes very big. So maybe I need to have a tendency to underplay the size of the eyes if I'm going for realism and if I'm just going for stylization and it doesn't matter. So this cat has some good interesting overlapping forms. So since the head is front and center, front anyway, we might as well put that in first. We can put in the the muzzle. And we can see the back is arched here. So we can assume that the spine would come down from the base of the head, go back up again and then go back down again and out towards the tail. And the hips would be, I think, tucked under like this. We'd be seeing the underside of the hips here. If we could see them because everything else is in the way. But just trying to use our x-ray vision to figure out what's where. So the forearm. At the elbow we can see pretty clearly. And scapula would mirror that direction. So scapula will be here. And on the other side it would be kind of going back over here. So the upper arm and the shoulder would be right there. And then the front of the ribcage kind of would be back there. The thigh would be and it looks like it would be coming pretty much straight at us. And the foot goes all the way back here. So maybe the thigh would be sticking forward a little further because it would probably be mirroring that to a certain extent. So then we can put the lower leg back into an angle like that. So there's the foot the other foot. Now there's a foot back there. So you can assume the think maybe the pelvis would be a little further over this way. But once again, I'm going to turn that off and see how I'm gonna make the eyes a little smaller than I have a tendency to want to do. And I'm going to bring those is fairly close together in high up on the head. See if I can have learned something from the last couple of goes. Okay, so let's see how that looks pretty close. That is could be a little bigger. Let me do them in green again. This is what we're really seeing. That wasn't too bad. Airways and I always think I'm pretty on the money there. So yeah. I learned something. This one is fun and we get a pretty good look at everything from overhead. This thing is like cleaning to a wall or something so we can put the spine straight away which turns into the tail and the hips, I would say would go pelvis bec in there. So that's where the thighs would spring out from. And we can also see the ribcage. And we've got our forearms. Elbow is there. And we know that the scapula is would be fairly well mirroring that. They'd be also moving in that direction. And the upper arm, we're basically looking down the length of it. So it's very short, it's very foreshortened. Kind of like we're looking down the length of it. So if you're looking at it from side on, it would look more like this. If you were looking all the way down the length of it, it would just look like that. But we're seeing mostly down the length of it, so it's short, or it appears short. Likewise, on this side we've got the upper arm here and then the scapula. Again. Following the direction of the forearm. On the, on the back, long foot. We can put the thigh bone heading in the same direction as that. Then the lower leg in there. And so similarly here, put the thigh down here because that mirrors the long foot there. And then the lower part of the leg goes in here, feed on there as well. Put in the head. But I sent a line in there. Is. Take a look at that. So you can see how seeing into the captain, plotting these simple shapes, it gives you a pretty cat-like appearance. And then if you just go over the top of that with some kind of an outline. This kind of overlaps elbow area, especially over here. It's got thin middle there. The tail in. This would be interesting to see how right or wrong. This ends up looking. Okay, well, I know that's where the head goes and then it goes back into there. So let's take a look at that pop out photograph back on. So my cat is a little bulkier down the bottom end here. Let's see if I was going to erase anything. I'd seen this bit out. There we go. This is just fluff back here, but still, I didn't account for enough fluff there. So let's put some extra fluff in there. Take another look. Yeah, that's not too bad. And that's how you that's how you learn is you use tracing paper or if you're using digital, then just use these layers but test yourself. Draw what you think should be, where you think it should be, and then look and see how right or wrong you were. Because then, you know, and I've learned so far that I have a tendency to make the eyes a little too big and is perhaps not quite close together enough on the top of the head. So, yeah, I mean, you just keep learning that way. Of course, the downside is of the human brain as you tend to forget things as well, which is why repeating the process, at least while you're learning your way into something, is essential. 5. More Wireframe Structure Over Photos: Well, this one should be pretty straightforward. We know the elbows about there. The scapula and the lower arm tend to mirror each other. It's like a three-part z shape or S shaped depending on which way it's facing. Likewise, here, that'd be there going on, on the other side. C, It can draw our round, slightly flattened round head there. It's on the front. And I would put the spine in like this. Now the spring continues into the tail and the hips go down a little bit so we can put a phi in here. That's where the knee would be. So again, long part of the back foot and the thigh kind of mirror each other more or less. So if you want to know where the thigh bone is, look at the back foot here. And you can draw a thigh in this heading in the same direction. Then we've got that bone there, ribcage and an awful lot of fluff. So then you drape the whole thing in a massive woolly sweater. And that's one cat. But when you're confronted with this big woolly sweater kind of effect, you want to know where these other little bumps go. Knowing what they represent. You can do that much more easily because you know, there's a bump here because it's that appear in the back of the heel of the foot there is a settling down ket, one sitting down cat, well, start with the flattened round shape for the head. Put a center line in. Can draw our little muzzle in there with elbows, pretty easy to spot. So there's our forearm. So we know that our scapula would probably be not really weight-bearing. So shoulder would be like about here. Yeah. So a scapula is not going to be in the same direction. It's more like this. So again, this this mirroring of the forearm and the scapula is pretty reliable when there's weight-bearing happening and when it's walking, running, standing, sippy cup. But when it's just kinda flopped out like this, not so much. So here's the knee. And look at this. It's really hard to tell what's going on in here. But I think we can assume that the phi would be there. The hill would be about here, and then the foot would be under there. The pelvis would be like this. Our spine would go down and then up again and extend into the tail. And the ribcage. Kinda be here. Then you've got your internal organs and what have you in? Awful lot of fluff. We can put F feed in. Yeah, let's, let's just have a little fun and see if me making the eye is a little smaller than I would have a tendency to do. Gets them in the right place. That is, maybe here. And for fun, I'll try drawing an outline just to see how that are winds up looking. I remember this was particularly hard to tell what was going on. So I'm just going to draw that. We can see how right or wrong this ends up looking. K elbow would be there. See what that looks like when we put it back on. Okay. Underestimated the amount of fluff. Maybe like a little more here, little more on the back there. But overall, not too bad. Didn't really account for the amount of fluff over the shoulder on the far side there. Got my eyes too high and too big again. So we'll continue to bear that in mind. There we go. Okay, here's one in a bit of a classic sitting pose to him as we'll draw our circle for the head. Put a muzzle in there. Center line, spine where it's pretty easy to see going down and around here. Now it continues out through the tail and the pelvis would be kinda coming back in this way. The spine goes down and up into the base of the head. Their ribcage be kinda like this. Size of B. Is the foot, the knee. Fairly close mirroring going on there. Not a 100% because it's just sitting. It's not like weight-bearing, standing, walking, running, anything like that. We can see very clearly the scapula here. And we can also see the forearm here. So we can mirror those put in the upper arm. So there's the shoulder area. Plop in the foot. Shoulder on the other side of be fairly close and then Nick like that. So I'm going to have a go at drawing the silhouette in there. And the eyes. Again, I'm always making them a bit too big. So I'm going to put them there. Is I'm putting in there. Okay. Well, let's see how we get along with an outline. So there was a need there, but it was all very fluffy. I have a tendency to exaggerate fluff. So I'm going to put more in than I would normally do. Get a little extra there. There maybe I'll do that. Alright. Moment of truth. Still under exaggerating the fluff. Look at this way out here. Still. Eyes are pretty good and is good. So that's good. Yeah. I I should have put this much extra fluffing around here. Yeah, I can feel pretty good that got those eyes and then he is on the money. So I'm learning as I go. Okay, well, another side view so we can put our slightly flattened ball in here. Put in our center line, put in our muscle. And the spine, which leads into the tail. And the hips would be see come head and down in this direction. I would say long part of the back foot is there, so that would mirror the thigh here. Put in the lower leg. The other ones are almost exactly the same. Then we have the forearm mirroring the scapula. So there's an upper arm. And rib-cage would be hidden down here. The spine will continue through into the neck. They're going up into the base of the head. So putting those feet so we know where the ground is. Then once again, I'll turn that off and see how I go with eyes is obviously my short-term memory is pretty short. At least I'm not having to remember back very fast and from looking at this in this picture. But let's see how we go this time. Bearing in mind that I underestimated the fluff gouache quite a bit on my other wire that goes here. So I'm going to put more in than I would be inclined to do. Since I know that's a bit of a bit of a failing of mine. So let's looks like it's first getting a little bit a hackles up there. Well, that looks like wave fatter than I would normally draw it. I think it can't possibly be down there, but I'm always wrong. So let's see. Okay. Not too bad. Just just overdid it a little bit there. But everything else is pretty good. So this is, this is a great way to just improve your sense of identifying these key anatomical landmarks throughout the body. And also just getting a sense of how well or how inclined you are to go one way rather than the other. When it comes to drawing a somewhat realistic cat. I've got my ears off here. I'm not too bad size-wise. So do do plenty of this and you'll get a pretty good understanding. And then you can just start drawing these real, you can start roughing out cats really simply by just bearing in mind these overall shapes, knowing that these tend to mirror each other. That's a really good way to make quick progress. I provided these all in the project resources. I would encourage you to go ahead and find your own references of cats, doing the kinds of things you're interested in. And just start identifying these key points, drawing them over the top, and seeing how well you can fill in the blank slate. Leave yourself some blanks that are things you are keen to learn. Like for me, I was just messing around with the eyes and ears. For you. It might be where the back legs go or where the scapula might go, or like how much fluff there was around it. Leave yourself a few things after awhile to fill in without the reference and then see how well you're doing. Great way to improve quickly. 6. Proportions: Let's take a look at proportions. And a square is always a good place to start. If you were drawing a dog, then a square would be good for fitting in pretty much the body. And then the neck and the head would stick out beyond that. We're not drawing a dog, we're drawing a cat. So what's the difference between a dog and a cat? Well, where you can fit the most part of a dog inside of the square. Cat is longer. So it's not a square and a half, but it's getting on for that. So you'd have to put the spine and the hips here, then the ribcage here, and the head. So getting on for a square and a half is the length of the body. And the head would take you out to, you wouldn't go as far as two squares. Like one square, two squares is further than a square and a half, so it's just kinda somewhere in-between. So we can put our head in here. So that's our overall proportions of a cat. And then by the time you've got all the internals going on here with the belly and everything. That's pretty much what you're looking at. And don't forget that your cat is so pretty much crouched all the time, so you don't draw the legs, leg straight up and down like that. For the most part there's this Z or kind of s-shaped going on. Anyway, let's get rid of that quick scribble. And here's a cat I drew earlier. Same thing really. But there you go. It's less than a square and a half long out of the shoulder area. Less than two squares out to the end of the head. And about halfway between the top and the bottom of the square is where the bottom of the body goes. Here's a very skinny sphinx cat. Those kinda hairless looking things just kind of exaggerated the skinniest of it, they're made the ears kind of big and the legs really thin. So when you're doing your different kinds of cats just change the proportions and you get a different cat. To make your house cat into something more like a jaguar or a leopard or a lion S or something like that. Enlarge the head. Make their head bigger. You make the feet bigger. And that's pretty much all you need to do. Just kind of beef everything up a little bit to make the rib cage a little larger, larger, thicken the legs a little bit. But you can see there's not that much difference between a house cat and a lioness or sort of Jaguar type of thing. Except for those few small tweaks. It just goes to show that when you adjust the proportions, you can really change the feeling of the cat. Of course this would probably, this is probably help as well with the feeling of scary bigness. For this last one is just a duplicate of this. But I just added where the four comes out to and they're sort of somewhat fluffy cat. So that's a pretty short head, tight skinned cat. This is a very loose, fluffy cat. So play with those proportions. And again, I say always start with a square. A square is a great place to start because it's just a sort of unified, sort of simple unit of measure. So I have a tendency to like squares and half squares. It's a good way to work your way into things and figure out the various relative proportions. You could start looking ahead lengths and how many links there are here and here. And it will guess a little kind of overwhelming. I like to keep it really simple just so that you're not getting hung up on things. If you're getting really serious about a drawing, by all means. But if you just wanted to jump in and have some fun, I would just say the quickest, simplest way to get the overall proportions is the way to go. 7. Head Structure Simplified, Plus Over Photos: When we're dealing with a cat's head, I like to think of them as a sort of slightly squashed ball. This is a little irregular in shape, but the muzzle of the cat kind of goes a little low down on the front. And to me, just seems like this head cream cheese in it, little single serving of cream cheese. If I could stick that on the front. Yeah, the magic of toothpicks, we've got our muzzle on the front. And just in case that's not clear enough, we can just draw where the nose would go and the mouth. Because she could draw the mouth around the side a little bit too. Just to clarify, that Smiley little cat. There would be a little bridge of the nose kind of going up into here. And then the eyes here. What could be more cat-like than a couple of bananas for ears, could put those on here. So just, you know, it gives you an idea of like just very simple shapes. And you really don't need to get to much more complicated than this to really sell something cat-like for the head. And we'll get into a little more detail. But for now, this is pretty good going. So yeah, a banana, some toothpicks, a little cream cheese single serving in a grapefruit is enough to kind of give you the structure of a cat's head. I'll just draw a few as well. So here's a cat skull, just to show you that it is quite long relative to how high it is. It is quite wide. This arch here really does add a lot of width to the head. And by the time you add those muscles into the head there and also into the, into the lower jaws, you get those very big cheeks. When you're dealing with learning shapes like this. Simplify them as much as you can. Always remember to put a center line around the middle. And also, if I put some rubber bands on here, you'd see how the shapes a bit kind of hexagonal. So here I've put some rubber bands around. And if you look at it from the front, you can see pretty clearly how hexagonal shaped the outside of the head, especially the width of this arch, gifts to the outside of the head and how tall and thin this muzzle area is. But by the time you've added the fleshy parts, it all kind of puffs out. But it's good to know what's going on underneath. This part here is the part I particularly liked to focus on underneath the eyes. There's usually a recession in the sort of furry face right underneath there. From the bottom, the lower jaw is very V-shaped thing. So if you're looking up at a cat, bear that in mind, it's much narrower than the full width of the head. And they can open their mouths quite wide. And it hinges here. This attaches to muscles at the top of the head to pull the door shut. And there's muscles going from this arch to the bottom jaw there to do the same thing. There's just a small muscle that runs from the corner of the jaw back here to open the mouth. So it's much harder to get a cat's mouth open than it is to push it up. Let's quickly see how grapefruit and plastic thing stacks up when we apply it. So we have a center line running down, say through the, through the grapefruit would go with labor around here. But because this nose is connected to it, we run that down into the into the end of the little plastic thing. There we have the nose and we can put the eyes in here is across the top of the head there. Starting points for our hoops. Goes down around the other side there. It goes down this side here. And then we just flesh it out around the back there. And so you've got a pretty reasonable looking cat head very simply. Let's try it again with this one. We start with a slightly squashed ball. And I have a center line that would be coming down our ball here. So it's facing this way. We put out plastic tub in there, not letting it extend too far from the front of our grapefruit shape. And I can draw some lines, so contour lines around to indicate where the eyes would fit within. The nose kind of obscures the fire I because we're kind of looking around. Heads moved around. The nose sticks forward a bit. So it gets in the way of the other eye, so we only see the far side of it. But again, our contour line across the top. That's like a, if this is a center line, this is central line going around the width. That gives us where we put our hoop in for the ears. And then you just give them that three-dimensionality you wouldn't see around the back of this one. And there's our nose muzzle. So there again is a very simple cat. But you get like 80 to 90% of the way there through very efficiently simple means. If you're just drawing cats for the fun of it and you're not copying anything or this gives you a pretty, uh, pretty quick and easy way to get to, uh, most of the way their cat head. We'll do one more. Start with our ball. Have our center line. That would go all the way around here if it was just a ball. And then we have a plastic container which sticks forward. Then as centerline runs forward over the bridge of the nose here. So we can put our nose in. And then we can figure out where the eyes go. And where the eyes go. I mean, got your ball. You've got your muzzle. Just draw a couple of lines that would go round the top of the head, round the side of the head. And your eyes fit in there. We can put the mouth in and see what that looks like. Here's the weird bit of the ears sort of has a double thickness bit like a little little recess kind of thing in there, some fluff, bit of a neck. There's another cat. I would start by drawing over actual photographs of cats just to get a feel for how to position these things and then just mess around, do some by yourself and see how you get on this one. Pretty much a side view. There's a bowl. Here's a little plastic tub. Eye's fit somewhere in there amongst here. Now the eye socket goes further back, but there's eyelids that you only get the front part of the eye when you're drawing it. And then their bananas back there. So again, bear in mind that I'll just undo that. Our nose is a little setback from the very corner front edge of our little plastic container that we were using. So when you're using little visual aids like this, be careful when you're looking at them on a real animal because you can start to notice then where they deviate because obviously a cat's face doesn't look like a plastic tub stuck on a grapefruit exactly. But it is a good guide and a good starting point. Start with drawing over some photographs to get a feel for these shapes. And then just start experimenting and just making them up and drawing them on scraps of paper and throw loads of them away. The key is just to get comfortable getting most of the way there through the fairly simple means of just these simple shapes. And then you can worry about getting things more precise after that. 8. Head Structure From Memory: So let's try out our fruity cat heads in a few different examples. So I'll draw my slightly squashed sort of grapefruit thing. I suppose. I'm gonna make it in the direction of slightly longer, I think so maybe I should extend that a little bit further back that way. And I'll put the center line down here. Let's be looking, say up somewhat at one of them. The plastic muzzle I used is a little bit on the sticking out too far side, I think so. I think I'm going to just draw something a little bit snappier. And on this one, we'll have it sticking out just a little way. And this one, this one we could do as a sort of looking down from the back so we can have a muzzle in that direction. And this one this one I think I'll get rid of and do one a bit more frontal and one more from the side. So we can put a muzzle here and we can put them muzzle here. I wouldn't extend it as far forward as on the thing I made out of the fruit. So we have a center line where the center line drops down and goes out. There would actually be a slope. The bridge of the nose would kind of slope down into that. So we can have our center line here. Center line would be along the very top. And here's our center line looking from the back down onto the head. So we could put our nose in, put a nose in here. And a cat's nose kind of has a bit of a curve to it. And it has these nostrils so we can it has a little ridge, not a ridge or a different kind of thing running down the middle and the bottom side. So that's what our cat's nose would look like facing this way. So we can draw a little cat's nose in here. We can put another one in here. And we're looking up at this one. So if we carry our center line and those would be sort of around here, the nostril there and here, and those would be sticking out of the front there. The eyes, we can just make ourselves a shape for where the eyes would drop in. From the front. We'll put our eyes here. I'm going to wrap that shape around. From the side. From the backside, you really wouldn't see the eyes at all. So we'll just not worry too much about them there. And up here, we've got very little seeing of the eyes. You just catch a glimpse of it like that. Which would be this part of the I would be there. The bottom edge. It just, you don't see too much of the eye because the angle is when viewed from below. The bottom part, obscures most of the eye. So anyhow, knows, like we said, there's a sort of bridge of the nose that goes up so we can draw that. Put the bridge of the nose in there. This kind of wedge shape here that has some width and it also has some depth. And it creates a nice little sloped down to the nose from the top of the head. From here. We have a nose wedge, has a little depth to it. If we're drawing it as a three-dimensional shape. That's what we're looking at. And so from here with slope down to our nose. And we can put the I in here and put the eyes in here. My cat's head is a little exaggeratedly flattened. I just wanted to make the point that the ball is a little bit squashed. I've kinda overdone it a little bit here, but can draw the ears. So if we have sort of contour line that runs around the ball in the opposite direction from the center line going this way. Going across the top of the head, just position that is equidistant from that center line. They come sort of downside. There's some room behind the eye to the ear. So we can remember that this is what that banana, it will be three-dimensional. So this would be the front cut section and this would be the backside where the skin of the banana was. Likewise with this one. We can mark our points for where we start the ears. Take the line down so we can draw a loop of wire if you'd like. And then the shape that it occupies in the back and then just connect, connect those to create our ear shape. And with this one, again, we're kind of down a little way from the top of the head. And you can draw loop. Then extend it back into that sort of half a piece of the end of a banana shape. And the shape that I, and let's not forget to deal with this muzzle. There's just a short distance down here and then we've got the mouth. So in this one we would just draw our mouth around. Like this. This one. We really wouldn't see it but the muzzle we'll just go in there. And this one going down and around wouldn't see too much in the opposite direction. And the chin is kind of somewhat receded. So there's a muzzle. And that shape that I really like that goes underneath the eye, the bottom of the eye socket. I'm going to put that in because I particularly like that. Put that in here as well. Then we have those cheek was big cheek muscles which fill out the side of the face here. So we mustn't forget to put those in. Then we can put some neck in there. Put those cheeks in, put some neck down there. And the back of the head for some neck back here. And that cheek. Put that in and the rest of the neck here. And then the neck kind of like a cylinder if you like, coming down. And we haven't yet put the is in on this one. So if this is our center line going around on the other side of the ball, we'd have the center line going here. Then if this is the middle of the hoop, we throw around the middle that goes in the opposite direction. This will give us our cross shape on the top and areas would begin about here, so they go up, down, and then we can just fill out the rest of the shape. And on the other side it will go up and then down. So we might just see a bit of air there. So putting the rest of n, who's going to scribble over the top and just see what we end up with for our, for our cats. Keeping things pretty simple. So I've just put a little bit more in here. And some other things I tend to notice is this seems to be a shape that goes in here, sort of like if this was clay and you just put your thumb and just kinda smushed down that that area a little bit. That's something I've noticed. So it would kind of go in-between the nose there and there. And the I. Quite often they have a sort of darker bit of color under here. And there's some fluffy inside the ear here. And then the outside part of the ear, which I kind of started to indicate their sort of has a double a bit like a little flap here. I'm not entirely sure what that does. But I know that also there's muscles that occupy a little space here that pull the air back. So when a cat gets angry, it's air can go all the way back like this. Looks a bit. Besides just flattening the air back like that, they can rotate them around a little bit too because of the muscle behind. Can just pull on this piece. That's kinda pull it around further. So there's a few quick basic cat heads just quickly constructed from where we were with our pieces of fruit and plastic cream cheese little container. So go ahead and practice experimenting with those shapes. And again, the important thing is when we're putting out a little cream cheese container on, don't go out too far with it. Well, you'll end up with a very different looking kind of cat. If you want a very different looking kind of cat, of course, then be my guest and push it out as far as you like, my end up looking a bit like a dog though. 9. Overlapping Forms: So if we have a few, let's say, circular pipes, circular in cross-section, lying alongside each other. They overlap each other in the sense that we don't get to see certain parts because the other ones are in the way. So for example, anything behind, behind here. We don't see anything behind here. We don't see if we get our point of view lower down still. Then you might get something more like this. Where this gets in the way of the one behind it. And this gets in the way of the one behind that seems pretty obvious. But when you're looking at shapes of cats, like the thigh and the upper leg, of the lower leg and the foot. Long foot. And these shapes kind of have a certain bulge to them. You see them from here. When you see them from another angle or when they compress, things start to overlap other things. And while you're looking for these three shapes, There's going to be times when this one completely obliterates your view of this one. But you might see this one sticking out from behind it. And so that's what you have to be aware of with overlaps. So don't try and draw everything that you know is there if you can't see it. So be aware of it, but also be aware of whether it's being obscured or not. An example might be your cat is sitting in a normal sort of sitting cat pose. And we've got this whole next section here. And we've got the shoulders that are the result of the lower leg is heading back this way a little bit. And then the upper leg is coming forward towards us a little bit. And then we have the shoulder blade going behind behind the neck. Well, the next kind of overlapping the shoulder blade and the shoulder area with the chest muscles and stuff. Overlapping. The elbow perhaps or the top of the low top of the forearm. So you might get muscles sticking out here. Like if this is your this is your scapula. This is the upper arm, this is the forearm. And then the first down here, you get big muscles kind of appearing. Big bulging muscles. There's forearm muscles as well. From certain angles you can see these muscles clearly and they're all lined up where they're supposed to be because you're looking at them from the side. And you might be looking more from round the back. These big bulging muscles will completely obscure this whole shoulder area and the rest of the upper arm. So that might look like Here's a cat. Here are the shoulder blades. There's some big muscles now the shoulder blades go forwards. The upper arm comes back, there'll be the elbow and forearm. We'll go down there and there'll be the foot. But these muscles, they just obliterate your view of the Most of the upper arm. So just be aware of that. Another overlap. Overlapping shapes can be fun. So we can draw like a tail. We can draw a shape like this. And we can draw a shape like this. We have a bunch of overlaps happening here. So we've got the tail kind of overlapping the the back part of the hip area and the hip area and the back legs kinda bunched up, overlapping. The rest of the rib cage area and the spine. And those are overlapping the scapula and sort of elbow areas and all of that is overlapping the head. So you just see the head and the ears. So you've got some very simple shapes that pretty clearly communicate that there's a certain view of a cat. But it's all these overlapping views. So it's kind of like three hills kind of overlapping each other. Say, it's kinda fun to draw them, but you have to sort of let your mind take a leap when you're looking at something kind of turning. And then all of a sudden these things that are nicely lined up suddenly are all in front of each other and bulging in ways that didn't seem like they should necessarily. So you've got your center line. It goes over here, goes over here, goes over here. So in an example, like three hills, it would look kind of like that. But we're looking at it more from here. And it's not three hills. It's a cat. So here we have the head kind of overlapping the neck. We have the upper arm here and the scapula area, overlapping. The ribcage, which overlaps the back of the spine area, which overlaps the pelvis. You've got all these overlapping shapes which this the forearm overlapping the upper arm. And on this side we've got the upper arm overlapping the scapula, which is being overlapped by the neck area. And then again the forearm sort of overlaps to a certain extent, the upper arm here, this foot overlap slightly. So overlaps are worth looking out for their good way of I'm drawing depth. So creating that sense of things in front of other things. The muzzle hurt here is overlapping. This part of the face, nose area is overlapping. This I so that's overlaps. So this is overlaps. Enjoy looking out for them and use them to your advantage to create that sense of three-dimensionality in depth. Do bear in mind though that when things overlap each other, you want to make sure that since you're seeing a foreshortened thing, you don't stretch it out to file width ways. So this whole thing is occupying more or less a square rather than a big long shaped like you might normally associate with a cat lying down. So get some photographs of some cats and start drawing these overlapping shapes. And getting a sense of how that is the result of foreshortening, looking at things from more the end view than the side view. Then after you've practiced drawing them over photographs for a while, just make up these shapes and just draw them in front of each other. And have some fun exploring that. 10. Flexi Felines: So as we know, cats are very flexible, but there's no reason that we have to stay within the limits of the actual flexibility. We can exaggerate that a little if we like. So what I'm messing around with here is I'd been looking at some cat videos and seeing cats kinda squeezed into all kinds of weird shapes. So I was using that as my inspiration for just a little bit of a warm-up doodle session. I saw like there was a cat that was just kinda sliding down the stairs, like it was a liquid or something. Um, so that's what I was basically messing around with here. And just just how flexible the shoulders are as well because they're not like firmly attached to any other bones, the whole arm structure. So it can pull away from the chest area a little bit. So that's what I was looking at with the cat being pulled up by his arms. Having a little bit of fun with twisting as well. Which led me on to imagining like a square length of sponge or a rag that's just been twisted a little bit. How that might look and then just turning it into a cat by putting some legs on each end or a head or pair of ears or whatever. Again, just, just having some fun experimenting, kind of not being terribly realistic about the whole thing. Then I moved on to some other cats. And for these, I wanted one end of them to be facing up on the other end to be facing down. And I don't know if a cat can go all the way a 180 degrees. I imagine that it's its head could finish the a 180 degrees easily enough. I don't know if it's chest could be a 180 degrees away from the back of its hips? Probably not. So that's why I've basically got its head facing up and it's hip area facing down. And then I just put a little color to indicate what was the top side of the cow and what was the underside. Just for fun, I thought croissants, that kind of pastry that's got a twisty look to it. Cats and croissants look a bit similar to each other, sort of ish. So I use that as my inspiration for just playing around with those shapes and putting a twisty cat there into a class on to sort of look. And again, just a little color to indicate one side versus white being the other side. So have fun with that. Play around with flexibility. You can just take any object and give it a twist and look at it. And then draw it as if it was a cat. That's kind of a fun thing to do. 11. Anatomy: So here's a cat skeleton, which we can think of like our wireframe armature. So we can recognize the shapes we've been working with this, the long flexible spine and the hips here, the ribcage here. Rib cage is fairly flexible. The hip bones, obviously they don't move at all. We've got the sort of round head. It looks a lot longer than it does on a cap here because of all the muscles and stuff which fill out the shape of the head. So let's take a look at the muscles. So here we can see a pretty simplified version of the muscles covering the skeleton. We've got the forearm muscles, which would flex the foot. And we've got the forearm muscles on the top side which would extend the toes and the foot that way. We have the upper arm muscles which bring the arm, the forearm this way and then extend the forearm that way when it's flopping around, when it's standing and moving around. The the triceps on this side of the long arm bone serves to hold this part of the arm and the scapula, the shoulder blade part of the arm, Pretty much more or less in parallel. So if this is a cat's arm, this part here being the forearm, this being the upper arm, and the scapula being this part here. It could get all very floppy and difficult for it to move around comfortably. So where the tricep comes in handy Is it operates to hold these two parts more or less parallel while it's running and got weight on it. And the same thing goes for the back leg. This long part of the foot would be represented by this. The thigh bone would be represented by this. And the leg bone would be represented by this. And the calf muscle. When it's standing or moving around, holds a steady tension and keeps these two parts more or less parallel. So anytime you need to know the angle of the thigh, just look for the long part of the foot and on the front anytime you need to know the angle of the scapula, the shoulder blade, at least while it's standing or moving. Just look at the angle of the forearm and it will be pretty much the same as that. If it's just laying around and you're pulling on his arms or it's having a stretch. That's not necessarily the case. So we have muscles in the head. There's facial muscles for wrinkling it up and making it look angry and that kind of thing. Then there's the muscles that serve to crunch down the doors and hold them shut. Here we can see cat skull. And this part right here has a muscle that goes onto this part of the skull towards the upper part of the head. And when that contracts, it pulls this closer to here, which closes the jaw. Similarly, There's muscles that go between the arch here and the bottom corner of the lower jaw. And when they contract, it pulls this part of the lower jaw towards this arch of the skull and assists in the pulling together of the jaws. Here is my little flexible representation of a cat. So we've got the spine, the ribcage, the head, the flexible neck. This spring is a bit stiff, so it's not as flexible as it should be. And the hips here, here are those three shapes represented in green. So you can start to recognize by seeing through into the skeleton of the cat, these shapes that we're getting used to looking for and getting used to drawing. Here are the legs. I've just kinda beef them up a bit. But by the time you add the muscles, see, I tend to draw my wireframe very angular. It all curves itself out quite a lot once you get the muscles on. And especially once it's got that big fluffy jacket over the top. But for now we can just see that the legs make this S shape and the S shape at the back. If it's facing the other way, obviously the S would be reversed, so it'd be more like a Z. As you can see there. Here I've indicated, once you start adding the skin and fur. Just how buried beneath all of that these, these bony parts are. But it's definitely good to know where they are and what they do so that you can identify them on a cat. So you see that little bump there and you're thinking, oh, that's the scapula. And you see that little bump there. And if you don't see it clearly, you know, to look for it. If you don't know to look for it, you probably won't see it. And if you don't see it, you probably won't draw it. So knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders, shoulder blades. These are all really important things to look out for, as well as the hip area and the rib cage. And it's always good to draw enclosing boxes. Especially when you're dealing with perspective. It helps you stay organized prospectively. If you don't do that, you can get into a bit of a mess fairly quickly. And this cat has a fairly arched back. If it's back was standing in a line with a straight back, it would be a longer shaped box. Obviously, if it's back was hunched even more like in their Classic Halloween type pose, then the box would shorten up even more. And there's, once again, I look at our cat with its muscles on, which fills it out a little bit, starting to look like one of those sphinx cat, those hairless cats minus the giant ears, of course. And those hairless cats are a great way to study the anatomy of a cat because they're not covered in that big fluffy fur coat. That makes seeing all this stuff so difficult. So let's take a look at some of those furloughs, Sphinx cats, and see what all this anatomy looks like in the flesh. So let's see what springs to mind when we look at these furloughs cats, we can see the elbow and the shoulder pretty clearly. There'll be the arm bone there. And the shoulder blade to be going back this way. And on the other side would be over here, the other shoulder. So the spine can see that curving in this direction would go through here and then up into the base of the head and the ribcage. Be in this area. Here's a knee. To me. I see the thigh coming from about here. This looks like the back-end of the pelvis. Pelvis will be in there. Then the ankle would be back here. This foot, I'm guessing is the foot on the other side. And then this foot would probably just be down here somewhere. Here's a quick look at the skull. Can see the skull pretty clearly in the shape of the head there. And just how much differ, Folks out the shape of a regular cat. Now this is really handy. It's really handy to use shapes like this to break down the body into the various sections. Because the whole shoulder area takes place inside this front end. And it overlaps the the ribcage and the spine which comes from the base of the skull, follows the top of the ribcage, goes down here. And then we've got our pelvis back in here and the phi to the knee, to the ankle, to the long part of the foot. I think we can see that their foot is fairly low and so SI would be fairly low as well, mirroring let that angle. The ribcage mirrors the lower part of the front leg. There's the shoulder. There's the other shoulder. This is all turning into a bit of a mess. But hopefully you can see as I'm drawing what I'm referring to. Then the feet. Again, we'll have a quick comparison of the skull with the head there. Now this one, we can very clearly see the pelvis area. So if we're going to draw it as a little box, it would be like that. And the thigh would be down here. Mirroring the long part of the foot on the back leg and the scapula. You can see very clearly the upper arm and there's the elbow sort of overlaps the scapula there. And then the lower part of the arm. We're seeing we're seeing down an a wave a little bit. So if you're looking from the side, this angle and this angle with very similar, but the shoulder blade does tilt in towards the middle. So from the from the side it would be like this. But we're seeing it more from a rear three-quarter and this is further away from us. This is closer to us, which is why it looks like it's leaning in that way. So we've got a ribcage and our spine goes down here through the neck, into the back of the head. And we've got a squashed ball for a head and the spine and continues through into the tail. But we can see quite clearly these leg muscles. This is the sort of leg biceps I suppose equivalent of a person. This is the thigh muscle. There would be on the front of your thigh. So this would bring the leg forward and this would bring this part of the leg back up towards it. But we keep, we keep the shapes kinda simple. Keep the neck kind of simple. Keep it simple. And just keep these overlapping shapes in mind when you're drawing these things. And then we've got the ribcage, but the all the guts and stuff inside here sort of fill out the space between the ribcage and the pelvis. Then let's not forget those big old ears. We can see how far the air kind of sticks out from the side of the head in this bottom corner edge. So the front part of the of the ribcage has the chest muscles attached to it, which go into the upper arm. And they pull the arms in towards the body. And they could pull them across all the way, the other way. How you could move your arm across the center line. If the cat contracts these muscles, do the same thing. And so you've got that hole in the front of the ribcage where the neck extends out from up to the head. Got the elbows, the upper arm up to the shoulder. And then this is all muscle this filling out, this bulking this all out. Then from the shoulder. You've got the scapula that heads off behind the neck. So the top above the above the rib-cage rib cage would be in here. Behind all this stuff. Again, we have a sort of flattened ball for a head with a little little cup shape on the top, on the front there. And we'll take a look at the skull alongside this cat's head again. So we can see that these pads fill out quite nicely. They cover over the big canine teeth. So the canine teeth being here, the lower canines or whatever they're called. So as I was saying earlier, the the wireframe armature, I draw which might be kind of angular. The knee especially. The actual bone itself kind of ends. And the next bone starts with a curve. So this space here isn't really a point, it's a big curve. So we've got the thigh bone curving in here, then the lower leg bone kind of curving down there. And you should be getting pretty good by now at spotting. Elbows. Shoulders are a little trickier to spot because they usually covered with a bunch of furniture and stuff, but on these cats, not so much. And then the scapula, which again mirrors the direction of the lower arm, the forearm. Ribcage would be kind of in here. Pelvis would be sort of tucked under here. So we'd be seeing the bottom of it there. We wouldn't see it because it's behind everything but the spine. Going down here into the neck, which goes into the back of the head there, of course, where we can't see it. But elbows, shoulders, ribs, the scapula here. I mean, it's behind everything so you're not really seeing it. But you should be getting used to spotting those elbows and shoulders and those knees. So again, we've got elbow over here, shoulder down here. Again, this kind of curves where it joins the shoulder blade as well. So this is a kind of more of a curved shape then just a point. So bear that in mind. Have another look at the skull in comparison to the head. Can see the very large orbits in the skull. Most of this top half is just covered up with eyelids. So that would be covering up the top half. Their nose sits just in front of this hole here. So this would be a hole put in some canines. They're starting to see the skull beneath. They're pretty small chin. And here's the, the auditory canal, I believe it's called basically ear hole. So these ears, even though they're all the way up on the top here, are funneling the sound down into here. Well, what do we notice here? We've got nice long part of the foot going back in there. So this is the lower leg. The thigh kind of goes back to here. And then this is a big bulky muscles so you don't see where the thigh attaches to the, to the hip from this view because it's got a big, big mound of muscle in the way. So here's our elbow behind here. And likewise over here. So the forearm is up like this. We know that the scapula is also going to be similarly angled. So good. Our shoulder up here, scapula would be leaning in over the top of the front part of the ribcage. There's a rib-cage. We've got these big muscles here occupying space in front of the upper arm and around the side of the upper arm and round the back side of it too. So if you're looking at your cat from the side and you've got scapula, upper arm, lower arm. The actual shape. But time you add all the muscles in. It's more like this. And this is a cat facing that way. Some weird reason this kept reminds me of rotting McDowell. Don't know why. Just seems to look a bit like him. But I like the very clear delineation of these muzzle pads and the arch under the eye there. Which on a furry cat, often you have a shadow under here. It's quite clear to see. And then you've got the cheek, cheek muscles. So turn that off so, so you can see it again. So here's the arch under the eye. And there's often, like I said, a, a big divot under there, which you can see quite clearly here. That's the thing I tend to look out for. And we can see a whole is here. And that makes sense. You can see in there it would be blank right back in there. So the sound is funneled back down this cone into the whole pack. Their shoulder blades would be here. So there we have a bunch of hairless Sphinx cats that gives you a really good look at the anatomy. So yeah, find more pictures of those online and spend some time looking at just get used to identifying those parts. The shoulders, elbows, and knees, the hips, the ribcage, the overall shape of the head, and those little key features there. The nice little muzzle arch. And how that is fit on the head and where the ear hole is. Once you are aware of where all these things are, like I said, you can locate them because you know, they're there and once you see them, then you can draw them. If they're in front of you and you're not aware of them, you might not even notice them, which means you won't end up drawing them. Which means your cats won't have as much character as they could have. 12. Twirling Skeleton: Here's a cat skeleton rotating so you can view it from all around, at least from one eye level. This is filmed from quite far back and zoomed in. So you don't get the exaggerated perspective effect. This one is closer and on a wider lens. So you can see that the head gets much bigger as it gets closer to the camera which is near. And it gets much smaller as it gets further away. This is all because the camera is quite close to the skeleton. And if you want to learn more about that, my perspective class would be a good thing to look at. 13. Loosen Up!: I think it's actually quite important to make lots of drawings that you're not intending to look good or do anything with. You're just throwing your pen around or your pencil and just having some fun exploring a feeling that pops into your head. Have a vague notion of something maybe that you want to draw and just start scribbling. Or sometimes just draw some lines in a random blobby shape and just let that dictate what comes next. It's like free form drawing. It's a lot of fun and it's definitely worth doing just to loosen you up and not be so super serious all the time when you're trying to learn to draw some stuff, you gotta give yourself a break and have a little fun in amongst all the hard work. 14. Personality Through Gesture: Personality and expression in your CAD drawings, I think just comes as a natural consequence of being observant and just trying to honestly re-create the feeling that you got from seeing the cats. And so here, for instance, I'd been watching cat videos earlier in the day and I was just filling a screen with drawings of cats. As I was remembering what I'd seen, I wasn't copying anything directly. I didn't have anything up in front of me at the time. But I had been looking at cats earlier and certain things about them were interesting me. So that was what I was focusing on, just trying to get those nice little poses and those kinds of attitudes and their frame of mind of threw my drawing just by remembering what they'd been doing and trying to faithfully recreate it. And fun thing about using Procreate is you can throw in some flat color, play around with it a little bit. And then you can just turn it to black and see what your silhouettes look like. And if you need to bulk things out a little bit here and there or, or trim things in. That's easily done. And you can just change the color of something in an instant and see what you think of that. And I didn't have any intention of doing black cats, but that's kinda how they ended up. Same thing with, with this really. Again, I'd been watching cat videos earlier in the day. I thought I would fill up a screen with drawings. Exactly the same thing. Just wanted to sort of get that feeling like the first cat that I drew on this page, I started with a little ground plane and then just put a cat in a defensive pose kind of low to the ground, looking up being monsters a little bit by another cat. And then just kept going and cats batting at each other and just jumping around and just re-creating the feeling that I've got from watching the videos. And then I used a very scribbly brush style of line work because that suits my, my sensibility. I suppose. I'm not really a super tight renderer. I kind of am a bit more of the easy, breezy kind of a thing. So that's why you will see lots of my drawings, very, very loosened sketchy. And one last cat here, I just started with a sort of circle, bit more of a potato, I suppose. Drew the face around it. And then just kinda carried on. And all I was thinking was let's do an angry cat sweating at something. And I don't really care how fancy and finished it looks. I'm just expressing angry cat and let's just see where it goes. And you can certainly see that once you kind of know your way around a cat a little bit, you know what the lumps and bumps actually are. You can you can express them really quickly and easily with just a few lines. That bulge there is the knee, that one is the elbow. That's the shoulder blades sticking up, whatever it might be. Worth putting the time into know your way around the anatomy of a cat because it just makes throwing a few lines down that actually are describing something meaningful. A whole lot easier. 15. Tracing VS Copying VS Memory Drawing: So this is really just my opinion on the value of tracing versus drawing versus drawing from life or from having watched a video. The only times I ever trace. Or if I'm working and I have a particularly tight deadline. And I found the perfect reference. Like if I'm working on a storyboard or something, and there's just no reason not to trace it because time is against me and I've got to get it done. Or if I'm trying to analyze something like you've been watching in these various videos. These lessons. I'm trying to learn something so I'll draw over something to understand its structure better. So I trace it in that instance as well. But even, even if you are tracing, you'll do a better job. If you have a good understanding of the structural foundations of what it is you're drawing. And what, what shapes go over in front of other shapes and that sort of thing. So you won't just see some things in front of you and be confused as to what they represent. If you understand what they represent, then when you draw them, it will make a lot more sense and you will end up doing a better drawing rather than just putting lines where you see edges of things and that's all there is to it. So for example, here I'm seeing this kind of folds kind of overlapping. And I'm just taking advantage of that. And you can see the way that the fur is kind of breaking up a little here. It's also aiding the feeling of getting a sense of direction of form. So this somewhat cylindrical shape is coming towards us. And so I'm using these to emphasize that with these kind of lines that go around the form, I'm seeing what's there and I'm thinking how is this useful to explaining what we're seeing? And that's why I draw those lines and leave out some others. And same thing is happening here. You've got these breaks in the in the fire, but they're helping to explain the form. I'm going to get a better look into the cat here by turning off this layer for a moment. Just to see what's going on. We've got a flap of like that sort of loose sweater kind of effect going back here, we've got some underlying forms, kind of creating these sort of harder shapes here. We've got a little bit more squishy folding of overlapping shapes going on here. So when I turn this back on again, and they where I'm going with this stuff. And it doesn't matter if you're using tracing paper or if you're doing this on layers digitally. Again, we can use these to emphasize the form of the upper arm here. Taking another look, I see this kind of breaks in for here. Yeah, that's, that's quite nice. I might use that. And I think I might just emphasize the shape of the Muslim here a little bit too. So putting a little bit of this, we could put these little dots in them here. The whiskers come out. Put that little break in the further helps describe the shape of the face. Let's see if there's anything else about the nose. A little bit of wrinkling up there. A little bit of wrinkling in the eye is there. I'm not going to bother with that. So that'll do for my traced cat. Just going to copy this cat, I would probably just look here and see an overall square shape. And put that down first. Then within that square shape, got a big shape here, which makes up the head. And the rest of the body occupies a space somewhat like this. And then we've got the leg, the other leg. And now we can sort of break down the shapes and sort of look into what's facing in what direction. And start to work out our forms. Because you're working out your forms. I kinda like the way a drawing ends up when you copy something better than when you trace it. Um, ideally, I mean, for me personally, I like to either draw from life or draw from memory. Having looked at something from life, that'll be my second favorite. And my third favorite would be to look at video and draw from having seen the video and just draw what I can remember. So it's a combination here of copying the shapes I'm seeing, but also kind of analyzing and understanding what they mean. Which makes the results a little more convincing than if you don't really know what you're looking at. Because you might not necessarily then see what's worth drawing and what maybe isn't. So I'm going to say that this thumb is there and these are its fingers. And a couple of little teeth there. There's that bit I always like to emphasize to a certain extent underneath the eye there. So when you copy something, you're more inclined to drop in little things that, you know, even if you see them or don't you sort of, you know, they're there. So sometimes you just draw them anyway. So it's a combination of that plus having the advantage of directly observing What's going on right in front of you. So copying other now I prefer copying to tracing. And like I said, I prefer drawing from life or from memory better than this too. But depending on what your needs are at the time, if you're hurrying through a job or something, then you just do the quickest, most efficient thing. Otherwise, you do what you particularly enjoy the most. 16. Silhouette First: Another approach to drawing rather than working the construction out with sort of line work, is just to start with the silhouette. And the thing that's good about that is if you have an idea of a cat, suppose that you maybe saw, but you're not entirely sure about. You can just draw a sort of blobby shape that represents, and then you can start working out what all the bits and pieces are after that and make adjustments as you go. I mean, an awful lot of cat silhouettes. If you look at a lot of pictures of black cats, for instance, if you just look for those online, you'll notice there's just a kind of blobby shape with some feet sticking out, but you can always tell exactly which way the cat is facing and just those tiny little lumps and bumps. They mean a lot. And that's why it's important to know what all the parts are and how they interrelate. So learn your way around the anatomy of a cat. And you have a much better time starting with the silhouette and getting something that's pretty convincing cat ways for the two cats interacting with each other. I thought, well that silhouette, you're never going to know what on earth is going on there if it's all the same color. So I did one cat, orange on one kind of bluey green. But if your silhouette is clean and easy to read without any line work at all, then you've done a good drawing that will be easy for anyone to understand. And if you do decide to put lines over it, then that's your choice and will just enhance the effect. And these rather goofy looking cats. I did them as silhouettes, but I didn't use a brush or anything. I just use the Marquee lasso tool. It's like a selection tool and you just like draw an outline and then you fill it with a color. And that's how I did these. They're very goofy style. I kinda like them there. They're funny. And to differentiate them from each other. I mean, I just did the eyes with the frowny top on the one in the middle. And I did the eyes with the sort of bottom eyelids pushed up a little bit on the one to the right. So again, start, start your silhouettes and if they are not looking entirely right, then you can start figuring out the internal structure of your cat and seeing where you might need to move a bump here or a lump there to get them exactly what you're looking for. 17. Movement And Eadweard Muybridge: What animators find particularly great about these sequences of photographs is not so much that you can make little movies out of them. It's the grid in the background. Using that grid, you can really study how far parts of the camera moving up and down and how far forward they're going. And with that, you can see where the weight is transferring and really get a feeling for the movement. So you don't just get to feel the movement, you can really analyze it as well. 18. How Cats Land On Their Feet: So here's a fun thing I watched on YouTube video called Smarter Every Day. Number 58. This guy, Destin, I think he worked for nasa at some point. Anyhow, using a high-speed cameras so you can watch everything back in super slow motion. He dropped his cat from holding it out in front of him onto, onto the ground or some soft landing. And so you could see how the thing turns itself around and lands on its feet. And what he noticed was, we start here and the cat's falling. The first thing it does is Arches back and pulls in its front legs. And it rotates in one direction with its front part and in the other direction with this backpack. But since it's back legs are stretched out and its front legs are pulled in. The front part rotates faster. So when it's rotated most of the way round, it stretches out its front legs and pulls in its back legs, or it puts its back legs out in the same axis as the length of its spine. So that, that spins around faster as well. Because if they're spread out wide, it slows down the spin. And if it pulls it in tight, it speeds up, kind of like ice skaters when they spin around on the spot. If they have body parts poking out wide, they slow down. And if they pull them in really tight, they speed up, spin. And then what happens is because it stretched out its front legs and it's got its back legs in an axis with the with the spine. The back legs catch up to the front legs and then it's facing all in the right direction. It just extends everything out, hits the floor. And those flexible shock absorbing legs soften is landing. So Destin on Smarter Every Day number 58 explained it beautifully. And this is my attempt to recreate what he explained with some very sort of stick type figure cats. 19. Rough Sketches: Once you've drawn a few 100 cats, you'll start to develop your own little shorthand for the shapes that you recognize and pop up over and over again. Certainly the ones that get your attention. So you'll be able to refer them out without putting too much time and energy into it. And the great thing about that is that when you're not feeling the pose is really getting what you want it to get. You can just start over or erase a chunk and do it again. You're not doing anything that's set in stone. I mean, I'm definitely all for getting the early stages where you want them without putting a massive amount of time in before you then move on. If you want to get into some rendering and careful shading and all that kind of stuff. Get it all properly worked out first and just experiment a little bit, but make sure you've got that worked out using refs before you go any further. And this last one on the bottom right is just looking down on that one from above. Then F that is particularly clear or not, it's not falling to the bottom or anything is which is being looked at from above. For me personally, getting the pose. And the feeling is really what it's all about. Putting a little personality in there. And that's why I I mean, I'm, I'm just I guess not that massively interested in rendering all the individual hairs and all that kind of stuff that would probably drive me a little crazy. But that's just my personality. If you are very much into doing that, then go for it. But I would still suggest that you get the feeling and the pose and everything worked out first. Because you wouldn't want to have sunk a whole lot of time into that. Suddenly decide you want to lower down the front end a little bit or put his head back a bit. You want to have established all that before you start the the rendering stage. 20. Class Project: So it's time for the class project. And the class project is of course to draw a cat or a bunch of cats entirely up to you. Just use something that you've learned from this class. It could be the sort of structural wireframe over some reference photos, type things, or just some sketches of cats where you use that structure for your rough. You could just do a series of drawings of cats with different proportions. And you could even go crazy and make them like real cartoony cats and some of them more realistic and some of them very skinny and some of them really gigantically fat. You can focus on the overlapping shapes are just draw some very twisty pretzel like cat, some cats doing some lively active things. It could be a very loose scribble or a very tightly rendered cat that you have worked out using what you've learned. I would say don't trace a cat, but you could copy a picture of a cat or some still have a video that you've paused. Or you could do it from memory. You could draw a cat starting with the silhouette and then put the line work in later or even leave the line work out if you want to draw a black silhouette cats. And if you want to post your results to the class project, then by all means, go ahead. I'll certainly enjoy seeing them and I'm sure you'll enjoy seeing each others as well. 21. Congratulations and Thank You!: Well, nice going. It looks like we've made it to the end. Hopefully you've learned how to draw more believable, lively looking cats than you are able to do before. Feel free to put your work into the project area. And if you have any questions, post them to the discussions and I'll keep an eye on those and reply as soon as I get the chance. You can find me here and there online on Instagram. I am Steve Worthington, art. And thanks again for taking my class. I do appreciate it. So just grab your favorite drawing tools and keep on scribbling.