How to Draw Cat Portraits

1. How to Draw Cat Portraits: Hey, how's it going today? We're going to go over how to draw cat portraits. So you can use this to draw your pet. You can use this to draw maybe your relatives pet or your friends pet, or maybe there's a cat on the street or cats and photos. But I'm gonna take you through this step-by-step. And it's gonna be for Beginners. I'm Enrique and artist and illustrator. So let me go over what I'm going to teach in this course. Firstly, we're going to go over the supplies because the supplies do matter in terms of what you use. Then after that, we're gonna go into the structure of a general cats, the face and head. I think that's pretty important to understand for jumping into this. Then we're gonna go over basics of shading. We're gonna be using either colored pencil or pencil. I'm gonna talk to you about the 101 of shading, at least what you need to know. You don't didn't need to know that much, but I'm gonna give you the essentials. So you can do at least this. Then I'm going to go over texture. Texture is a big deal when you're dealing with a cat, with a fluffy, furry cat like a kitty. Textures really important. Almost like 50% of this is about texture, if not more. So, That's a very important video. And then from there, we are going to go into a full-blown and demonstration. I'm going to go through drawing a cat portrait from beginning all the way to the very end. And that's really important because you're going to hear my thought process through the entire thing. That is it. We can start the lesson right now, it's not very long, It's a very short program. So let's just jump right into it. 2. Supplies: Let's touch really quick on shading. Before shading them, I'm going to really quickly touch on the pencils that you should use. Tend to use LED, or you can use like a Prismacolor colored pencil. I use these two and these are great couple of differences. One LED, There's many different types of lead. Lots of different types hole. Let me grab another one. Lots of different types of lead, for example, this is a six-bit HB and a sixth. So when you're using regular graphite and they call it graphite, like a regular pencil, like the stuff used in school. In luck in school. I think they used to be for tests. You're going to probably have to use multiple colored pen, multiple pencils, because HB won't really go dark enough. And if you really grind it into the paper, the issue is that it is possible that it'll just become shiny and weird. You need something like this or it's more effortless to get a darker tone like a 6-bit. To really get those darks into kind of like you're finished stuff. You need multiple. This one is being Prismacolor, a little bit more of a colored pencil. You can get pretty much a range of values. Let me put that next to this. You can get a range of values pretty quickly. The problem is it's much, much harder to erase this colored pencil. You can definitely do it, but much harder to erase. If you make a mistake, it's gonna be like you, when you erase it is gonna get kinda messy. So you'd have to be very aware of that. I mean, it's up to you. I prefer I can tell you what I prefer. I prefer if it's quick, I use a colored pencil. If I have my time, I use the HB and the, the graphite. Also, there's two different kinds of graphites. There is the Hs and the bees. This isn't the middle. But if use the bees, bees are for more organic stuff, meaning five before B3, B2B, all those used the bees because there's two h, Those are hard leds. And that's more for like architecture, but we're doing portraits. So use anything from Tooby all the way to 70 or whatever. I think AB eraser wise, use a couple of different erasers. I would use an eraser pencil, which I don't have with me, you know, those those ones with the hard erasers, are they like you can you can pull up and we'll see. I thought I thought I had one right here. Hold on. I don't have one but you know what I mean? Those long, stiff erasers that you can but they're thin. It's like a pencil and you can kinda go into it or I can just use the back of an eraser like I'm back of a pencil like I'm doing. And you should use this. And this is a kneaded eraser. Kneaded eraser is like this Plato looking at eraser. And the cool thing I liked about this. And you can shape it into any form that you want and kind of pull back the lead kind of overall on a gradual sense. So I do recommend that as well. But yeah, I would recommend that a lot. But I would say for something like this, since you're doing for, I would say this type of any sharper, harder eraser will probably be more necessary for this. That's the supplies. I didn't expect to talk that long about it. But let's actually move on from the supplies here and let's move on into shading, like in the next little lesson here. 3. Cat Head Structure: Let's jump into some very quick proportions for this portrait. So I think a good idea is to generally know about cap proportion, even though you're probably going to be drawing obviously from reference, right? You'd be drawn from your pets and your friends pit from picture online. But some quick things on how I do the structure of the cat is this is a very quick stuff, honestly. Just to kind of when I look at, you know, like reference or when I think about it, I think of like a cat's head as essentially like circle like that. If it's facing forward, like completely forward to us. Like an egg on its side. That's what I see in as far as my mind's eye goes. The eyes tend to be pretty large and usually roughly around the center of that is around the center of that I like so something like so it's a little bit at the edge here, a little bit not quite in the middle. If anything, if anything, there might be more space in between the eyes than there is from from the eye to the outside of the head. And it's gonna depend on CAT per cat. But usually I find that, but not always. The nose is a little bit lower than this. Top of the nose. Maybe about halfway between the bottom and the top. You don't have to remember these measurements at all. By the way, this is just some loose stuff that I picked up along the way. But let's say the top of that nose is around this area. The nose I treat like an upside down triangle. You pull down a little bit. The split and the mouth. Maybe halfway between the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the chin. Curve these back. Like I said, these aren't like fast set proportions, but this is stuff that I use to kind of get myself started if I get lost. Depends how hairy The cat is. Some cats are for ear and it'd be harder to see these proportions right in the side because they have hair along the side. So it might be harder. But I'm thinking of the skull usually when I think of stuff like this. The ears themselves, pretty obvious that there are almost always triangle shapes. And they stop about there at those kind of construction lines. Then you have the neck and everything else below. This is just a cat portrait class, so we're going to stick to that. But that's kind of what I think about in my mind. When I'm drawing every cat, if he's at another angle. Things slightly vary of course, but that's kind of the thing that I'm thinking about in my mind's eye. Definitely even no matter even at a right angle here. I'm still going to stick to that circular kind of potato shape on its side. Let's just say it's facing to the left a little bit. I kind of remember those proportions a little bit, but it's not, they won't fully disappear like I'll still keep it a distance from over there. But they will adjust. But the biggest thing for this, as I remembered, this space between the eyes, that space between the eye stays pretty consistent even at it turned angle symptom many times unless it's really turned the nose, we'll cover it up because the nose has like a bump on it as far as the nose goes as well, the bump. It's a little bit more than us. We have more of a, you know, like above our nose usually is a very like an indention like on a human. Going to draw like a human shadow over here. Super quick to show you what I'm talking about. Let's just say that's a human shadow over here looking to the left. Let's draw his eye. Wherever my human, even if he has a big nose, a cat, it would profile the front of the face. Would be more like this. Isn't like imagine the cat's nose right here. There's a human's knows, a cat's nose right here. And let's just say the cat's eye is over here. There is this huge bump, right? When the nose starts for a cat that we have, but not as we have it a little bit more exaggerated. We have much more of an indention here, the cat doesn't. So it's kind of like almost, you can almost draw like a straight line for the front of the cat's face. But that's another thing to remember because that's a big thing that can get in the way, especially right here at angles like where the cat slightly turned to the left. You're going to find that their nasal section there knows the top of their nose is getting in the way of the other eyeball like immediately. Because of that. It might hide the other eye a little bit more than maybe in a human it wouldn't do that. But anyways, that is it, that's it as far as simple proportions that I remember for portraits. So let's move along to the next step of this. 4. Shading 101: This one's really important this lesson. And the reason I'm gonna say that is because we're going into basic shading, which I do occasionally I'm gonna give you a primer for shading meaning, and I'll give you just a, a good start if you've never done it. Shading 101, normally we start with simple forms, right? Circle. Let's just say, or like a sphere, let's say a cube was thinking 3D. Almost always. The light source, not always, but nearly always the light sources coming from above. If we go into a room, the lights on the ceiling, that's the light source. If you're outside, the sun, light source coming from above. Obviously for dramatic lighting like in movies and stuff like that, lighting is coming from the sides and the bottom to make them look maybe more ominous and a movie, if you ever see like the Frankenstein movie, they'll do that. But right now we're going to work with the basics of shading, which is almost always coming from above. From above here. From above here. Unusually, it's coming from above and a little bit kind of at the object, kind of like not totally flat like this. It's going to be coming like this in at an angle, at an angle downward. Let's just say we have something like a square. A square will catch light here, but will not catch light here, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to fill in just quickly just to show you. This isn't just to demonstrate. It's going to fill in very quickly right there because that's gonna be in the dark. And this will, this side is also going to be the dark. Bright. Very simple with a square, really pretty remarkably simple. Circle. A little bit different. If you go to something like the light will. Eventually it's going to dissipate a little bit differently, but it'll be something more like this. With the circle. That's if we were to keep the tones flat. But we're going to have to go into something else. So light source is coming from above. This right here is an edge. Was this. Let's talk about edges. See how the transition between light and dark was instant. See how this is light. This is dark. Very, very instant because There's a corner here. It's very, it's very simple to kind of separate the light from the dark there. Here. Even though I drew that line, it wouldn't really be like that. Let me draw what it would really be like. If you have a circle down here. The line right here where, where, where the, where the light, excuse me, where the light is. The dark begins. It's not gonna be like that because it's a rounded form and shadow. Light kinda, kinda wrap around the form. This is a smooth, this is a smooth shape. So what you're going to have is something called a soft edge. This is a hard edge right there, hard change. And this is soft. It's gonna be something more like this. We're just kind of short cutting it right now. It's like a fuzzy edge, right? It's like fuzzy, pretty much. Like if you look out of focus or something like that. This down here would be in dark. But what the thing the edges do is they describe the transition from light into dark. Light. The transition here is a corner, completely easy, hard edge, that's that edge, that hard edge. Here. It's a gradual, it goes from light gradually into the dark. And that's why we need a softer edge. Those are the two biggest edges and everything in-between obviously will happen. It happens in nature, but really artists use this to simplify stuff. You want to simplify things for people to understand. These, you can make there's everything in between. There's firm edges, which is like kind of in the middle of that, right? If we're just talking about the edge, um, you know, like for cylinders maybe. But really, right now, all you need really is hard and soft. And something like a cat SFR is going to be mostly soft. But these are good to know just to kind of understand it because there will be hard edges in the eyes, but I'll go with that in the demo. So that is a primer, really quick primer for shading just to kind of vaguely understand it. And that's all you need to understand until we're gonna go into texture, which we're going to go into right now. Okay, in the next lesson, Let's go. 5. Texture on Fur: Okay, Let's jump into, let's just say right now we have a bowl. We're going to, we're gonna go over texture in this. Let's say we have a ball, but let's go over texture in this ball, right? How do you make this ball look textured? We found out vaguely how to make it look shaded. There's a light source from above and it's going to be hitting the top of it and then the bottom is going to be in dark. How would we handle for it? By the way, I'm only going to use the rounds here because the heart edges don't. The box is not going to really apply almost at all. For a cat portrait. Like I said, a little bit in the eye, but not really. So let us take this round shape and make it furry. It's gonna have to remember we talked about this. If a light source is hitting from above, hitting a ball, the cutoff point is gonna be maybe around here. And this is up to you, right? If the light source coming from more behind, you can design a differently, but we're gonna say it's coming down forward and at this spot, let's say like right here, if I hit the middle of it, that would be the highlight or something. But we're doing like a furry shape. Right off the bat. This down here. I'm going to map out my shadow where it's gonna be just kind of loosely. It's gonna be soft. I do want to remember that. So I'm going to already started doing this, making it fuzzy. You do that with a side of the pencil. Obviously I'm I mean, I haven't really talked about that, but more obviously, you do to the side of the pencil. It's kinda hard to do it with the tip of the pencil. It'll take too long. So just kind of lean on the side of it. Something like this. And it's gonna be dark under here. Dark on this side. Dark enough. I don't know that's coming down on camera. Hopefully it'll become out fine. And I'm using it like so. There will be bounced light from the ground or like another light over here, like a table or whatever usually were in a room. A lot of light coming from everywhere. But let's stick to this sort of thing. We have. I usually map out the shadow and I fill it in. But now we have to make this thing look very. And the only way to do that is to do it old school, you go into it and just start pulling lines, pulling thin lines all over the place. They just kinda do this. You're going to okay, as far as the direction. I mean, on an animal, obviously, the firm is going to go all over the place because it's just the wafer is that's the nature of fur. You can go over here, pull on the edges of the outside over here, even in the dark. All right, it's gonna keep doing that. This looks like a bald spot so far. So I'm gonna go over here and do the same thing on the lighter side. Let's say the balls white. Let's just say that nothing too, like gray white. So we don't have to do that normally throwing in scratch marks like this in a direction following the flow of the fur you're giving and taking. So for example, what a lot of people recommend doing is getting those blenders. He would see those things like tissue or something like that. I hate those. I think they're unnecessary in the trash. That's my opinion. But what because you can just go right here and go to your finger like this. Move it around a little bit. Don't do that too much because your finger has oil on it, natural oil, that's just the way it is. Eventually doing that too much is going to make that really hard to erase stuff. Do we erase in general? We want to keep our ability to erase because sometimes we're going to do this, pulling with a sharp eraser back a little bit. I'm kind of throwing some stuff on there and my eraser is a little too dirty because I'm actually giving back some lead here. When I do that. I can find another one. Definitely don't use a pink eraser. Those things are trash because they stay in the paper. I found another one cleaner going over here. I do that and then I go over it again with my pencil. Right here. We're just going to keep doing that back and forth. Daisy kind of moving table. They're going to keep doing it. Make and put your finger here through the top of it as well. And you essentially kind of keep this up. Eventually, you start finding more darks in the dark section over here. And you start forming that texture. Over time. I'm not going to lie when, and I'll talk about this during the demonstration of the actual a cat. But this part of it right here, this little like this takes forever. It takes a long, long time. So really learned to enjoy it. That's one advice I really want to give you. Just enjoy the process of doing that. It's kinda like you're cleaning up something or some people would call rendering. You want to enjoy the process of doing this. And it really is pretty enjoyable, honestly. Pulling stuff, you're bringing stuff back, you're pulling on the ear. You're constantly kind of toying with it, and so on. You can just kinda keep that going, honestly, I would, but right now we're going to jump into the demo, but that's kind of like more or less kind of how you render the firm. You're usually thinking about the surface below it. But that is how you do that. Let's actually jump into the demonstration so that I can show you literally the entire thing from beginning to end. There will be some fast forwards in it because it kinda have to, but pretty much the entire thing. Let's jump into it. 6. Drawing Demonstration: Let's go into the demonstration. I'm going to go with pencil here. I usually like to start with that circle. I mentioned. Something like that. That might even be a little, little big, but that's going to work for our purposes. Draw a line in the center just to kind of keep a vague idea on proportions. It doesn't have to be fully proportioned or anything. Good idea. Draw a circle here for one of the eyes as far as circle area. One over here. Line down here, line down here for kind of a snout area I mentioned. Here. I'm drawing the mouth area over here and draw that ear. Again. We're just drawing the I'm just drawing the land, right? This is the column, the land, which is really just kind of a lines of framework, loose framework, and then figure out what I have to move around. Right here. I'm thinking about the eye right there. Down go down here to the nose. Here. Curving in, down here, curving in. And underside of the nose. The nose has this kind of triangle, but a little bit like a mushroom shape. Going down quite a bit. And finding the mouth here. So far, I'm digging the proportions. Hopefully you can see it. It's really light. Hopefully you'll, you will in time. But I'm just going to go in here. I like starting with strong line art. Going to go to this side right here. I'm going to draw it in there down here as well. So that thing would be access to the eyes with a cat is a little bit like this. So for example, I'd hear the corner design is like this. If you were to draw a line from the corner to the other corner of the eye. It's kind of like an angle. That's kind of important to remember here. One over here doing the exact same thing. Remember general head right here. In terms of the design and the cat that's gonna be up to you or the cat that you're drawing. Because they have a lot of stripes. Is it just one color? Is it That's going to be up to you. So you're gonna have to kind of make that decision or you're gonna have to just look at the cat, you know, as far as the dark and the light shapes on the, for the cat, I'm gonna do, I think I'm just going to make them mostly darkish here, maybe brown. Like a white area here. I'm just going to keep it simple for the demo. Now I'm going to thicken up the lines here and then a thicken it out inside and going inward. Downward here. Same thing on this side. That's pretty, pretty cute to draw these. It's fun to, like I said, draw it and draw your pet or someone else's bed. It's really, really fun to do that. Go over here. And you can even them out if you want, but doesn't have to be super even it wasn't even enough because I think this one is shaped a little differently. This isn't goes up a little bit. I think the dark of the eye right here has to do with reflection or I forget what it was is a reason for that. Not to like the sun. Sun doesn't bounce off, reflecting the VI. Go in and actually draw a cat's eyes. We can draw the cat's eyes big or small. It's kind of like up to you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it relatively large. Same thing here. Slit pupils there. I don't know if, if slipped pupils and then have really rather large eyes are not going to throw a highlight here. Highlight here. I'm going to fill it in. Drawing that. I did that. Let's go into the ears more because I haven't really put the ears like quite there yet. They're there, but they're not entirely there. A lot here. And over here at the top of the head trying to line a little bit more of a line there. But I have to remember that a lot of this is textured, like we learned in the texture video. I have to be very kind of have to realize that I'm going to, it started drawing into this like a lot of furry. Make the math a little bit smaller here. I can look cuter if I make it a little bit smaller. I think we might be at the point where I can start putting in some darker shapes. Like I would say, like maybe like first shaves, I think I can start doing that kind of. But let me start doing it around the mouth here. The mouth right below it. Dark shape, relatively soft and it's going to get darker as it goes down here. Something I'm gonna do. Now that I have most of the lines here, because this is most of my lines is I think I'm going to and he's not gonna be that furry. He's going to have short for, but he'll have, you know, like a decent amount of it, nothing like to. He will be fuzzy though. So for example, like here, I'm gonna start with this. I'm gonna take the line. I'm actually going to write there, start out drawing lines along here and mostly in the same flow. Obviously changes direction and things like that. Try draw the neck in a little bit. Nothing to me. Though I think it'd be thinner. One over here, putting some hair in the ear, has a lot of hair coming out of the year. So a lot of cats are I'm going to go over here on this side too. I'm going to speed this part up. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to throw these. I'm going to break up the line that I drew with this line going in the opposite direction or in the inverse direction. I'm going to start here by throwing that in, but it's gonna take awhile so you can watch a fast forwarded version as I do it and I'll come right back. At this point, I went around and kind of fuzzy it up a lot like anything with a line. I was just going to put on in many, many lines going the other direction to make it look more like fur. One way to do now is I'm gonna go into the nose and really trying to shape that out a little bit, not go with you in it. So there's a bit of a line in the middle right here of the nose itself, actually below it right here, this mouth part. I'm gonna really fuzzy up this line are what we talked about edges. This is like very much a soft edge or somewhere in between. It's like a line but it's like fuzzy. Pretty much everything around the cat is fuzzy except for the eyes. Line over here. Line over here. These are kind of like, you know, where the whiskers are, the dots. They're called, forgive me. I should know that. They're really where the whiskers come out, right? I think that's kinda what they are. You can kind of draw a line to indicate those shapes. Right there. Let's give a little bit of value to the nose. There. I'm just going to throw a little bit of value over the whole thing. In order to make that look lighter, you are going to darken up the darkest area of that which would be the nostrils. Nostrils really darken it up, being pushing it down harder right there as well. I think I spoke. I mean, I'm gonna, he's gonna be pretty dark. So I'm going to throw in value pretty much all around this area. He's gonna be dark all along here. Not below that, but all along here. So I'm going to actually throw in a light value all over. So I'm gonna fill that in. I'll do that enough fast-forward and I'll get back to you. Okay, so darkened in a couple of select things. So basically what happens is I'll occasionally here I'll darken in just some select for around the edges. I was doing that everywhere to kind of give it some variety because this for and some of it's lighter or darker. Some of it in light will hit it a different way. But you are more or less just layering over and over and over and over again, creating this texture everywhere. But I think the texture is what brings it to life here. Underneath I might throw a little bit of a darker area here. Is gonna be a little bit of shadow here from finger there through their little bit of shadow here from the chin coming down here. Yeah. Just kind of good stuff here, all around the edge, just kinda like this. If you really want, you can also draw a background maybe, but I think this is enough honestly for animal portraits. I don't like putting a background too much because there's so much detail in them that I think the background is completely fine. Blank. But for this, I can just maybe go across here just a little bit. Not throwing real, maybe not real texture at the bottom here, just to kind of soften it out. Also with the eyes, you can maybe pull a little more of a highlight right here. Let me put my finger here through the eyes. A little bit of a highlight out over here. Just a little bit, but not much. But yeah, I like to leave a lot of this area usually pretty light, especially if it's white fur. Because the first white, I like leaving that area pretty light. There you go. You've got to just keep working on this forever. Honestly. It's really, really fun once you get the rhythm to it, It's really, really fun. So I encourage you to keep working on maybe make a head of a bunch of cat faces and stuff like that. A bunch of cat portraits until you get it down. And like I said, it's fun to do this. It's fun to draw this. But yeah, thank you so much. I will see you later and that's pretty much it. Okay. Make one of these, make one of these, and post it and I'm going to comment on every single one. All right. Talk to you later.