Learn How to Draw Cats!

1. How to Draw Cats intro: Hi, I'm Amy, and this is cocoa and we are here to teach you how to draw cats. In this class, we will go over the basics, starting with drawing from reference photos. Beginning with simple poses, we will analyze some of the basic shapes you can find whenever you're trying to break down the form of a cat to draw it easier. I will also include notes during the analysis phase, and eventually we will move on to drawing our subject. We will then continue small lessons increasing in difficulty as we go along. Then after our sketch session using various cat poses, we will focus on the cat's face specifically so we can go into greater detail on probably what is the most important part of the cat. By the end of this class, you will have enough knowledge to go out there and find your own references and make your own projects using the lovely form of cats. You know we all love them. Hope to see you in class. 2. Lesson 01 - Starting with a simple seated pose: For our first lesson, we are going to pull out a very simple reference photo of a sitting cat and we're going to analyze it first before we begin drawing. You will also be able to find all of these reference photos down below in the classroom documents. Let us begin the analysis. The goal of the analysis is to break down the shapes of the cat into smaller little bite size pieces so it's easier for a new layman to understand. And here I already have a start. The cat's head is very round. Is ears are triangular, and the bulk of its body here looks kind of like an egg with a flat bottom. And then there's a little trapezoid between the head and the body here. And then the tail is kind of like a big old sausage, and you don't want to eat that sausage because we don't eat cats. We can go ahead and take things even a step further here and say that this cat's head is more like a rounded diamond shape. Cats can often have slightly different face shapes, but one thing that remains constant is their ears are always little triangles. Now that we have our analysis done, it's time to start drawing. You can start drawing by just plotting out all of the basic shapes that we found on the photograph on the left. Following the shapes will get you a good starting base that you can then refine. For those of you who are a little more advanced, you may just want to draw the cat, how you normally naturally draw. This is fine. You do not have to start out with the actual shapes to use as your base. If you are more comfortable drawing in another way, then go ahead and do that. I will now leave you with a slightly sped up version of my own sketching process for you to see how I do it. You may also choose to sketch your own cat at this time, or you can pause the video and do some sketching on your own. When this little clip is done, we will come back and discuss a few more details. I also want to mention that during this lesson that you can feel free to use the Lasso tool and the Transform tool to adjust any of your drawings that you feel are not aligning with the vision of the photograph. Don't feel as if you cannot use all of the tools at your disposal because you think it might be cheating. These tools are there for a reason and nothing is cheating when you're doing everything by hand. Once you have a good base down, you can begin adding details like I have. These details will bring your creation to life. Also, don't be afraid to not be perfect. This is all for practice and just for sketching and having fun. This is how you learn, don't worry about being perfect every time because not every sketch will be perfect, but you will gain the knowledge to eventually one day be as perfect as you would like to be. So I'm going to go ahead and stop the lesson here with only one sketch. If you feel ready to move on to Lesson two, go ahead and you can continue that now. If you feel you need a break, go ahead and take a break, and then you can move on to Lesson two, where we will do a slightly more advanced, not too much pose of the cat. See you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 3. Lesson 02 - Sketching a slightly more complex seated pose: So here for Lesson two, we're going to amp up the difficulty just to touch, and we are going to do another sitting pose that is slightly more complex. In this pose, you also get to see the cat's forelegs and one of their back legs. So this introduces a little more complexity. So let's begin again by doing another analysis. Again, we will start with the head and notice that it is a very nice round shape with a slightly little diamond point on the bottom. Next, we can see again that the cats ears are little triangles. Now, as we can see the cat's forelegs here, our upper torso shape becomes a little more complex, and the legs come off of the front torso kind of like two little logs, and the little front paws are just some nice tidy little ovals. And here, the back torso looks about like a quarter of a circle, or it can also translate into another squat little flat bottomed egg, as well. Now, let's go ahead and analyze this torso a little bit further because we can see the rounded portion of the bottom leg, and it kind of looks like a little artisan loaf of bread, one of those little bolls around one. Now the foot on the back leg just looks like a little sausage link and you can go ahead and in the upper torso, you can put a couple trapezoids in for the upper leg portion since there is a joint between those little trapezoids and the little logs of the leg. So by fleshing that out, you can get more detail into your drawing whenever it finally comes time to draw. So let's go ahead and start drawing now. As with doing normal human figure drawing, it is often easiest to start with the head, as the head can be a basis for the proportion of the rest of the body. For me, I also like to flesh out the head a little bit before I continue. As you can see here, I've used a little crossbar to indicate exactly where the eyes are going to hit and to find the center of the face vertically. Doing this helps keep the proportion of the face together, and we will discuss this more in a later episode. Now I will go ahead and speed up my drawing process slightly just so you can actually see my whole drawing process and have it not take too long. Just a friendly reminder, making changes while you're sketching is perfectly okay. That is, after all, the whole point of sketching. And here I have the cat mostly finished, sketched out, anyway. And I want to remind you that your sketching does not need to be perfect. And however you interpret the cat, that is you developing your own style of drawing. You're still referencing and you're still learning things, but you're also developing your own style along the way. So I'm going to end this lesson here, and in the next lesson, we're going to do a much advanced pose for the next sketching session. If you feel that you're ready to move on to the next lesson, go ahead and do that now. If you feel like you need a break, go ahead and take a break. Either way, I will see you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 4. Lesson 03 - Sketching a cat in motion, a running pose: Alright, so for our first advanced lessons, we're going to tackle this portrait of a cat running from the side. All right, so let's just go ahead and jump into the analysis. So from the side and running, the cat looks quite a bit different. The head shape has changed from a perfect oval to a circle with a little trapezoid on front for its muzzle. Its ears are still triangles, and there is a trapezoid there for the neck. Then you'll want to break down the legs. Again, you'll have a little triangle area where the muscles for the leg is, and then a trapezoid for the base leg. The body is kind of like a tube, and we'll cut it off there at the back leg so we can check that out later. The bottom legs up front are, again, two more rectangles, some little ovals for the feet, and then the back leg area, you're going to have a real rounded kind of like a loaf of bread shape there for the whole hunch of the back leg. And then you're going to have a little square coming out the back and then a kind of a rectangular shape for the back feet. That was a lot of information all at once. So let's just pause here for a minute and look at the cat and analyze how all these shapes come together. When you are ready, let's go ahead and get to sketching. As this is a more complex pose, I'm going to slow down a little bit and plot out this cat using some of the shapes that we analyzed in the image. I will go ahead and leave you now with a slightly sped up version of my sketching so you can watch it in a timely manner. And if you feel like sketching along at this moment, you can or you can wait until the end. Once you feel satisfied with your basic form, you can go ahead and zoom in and start adding some little details that will bring this little cat to life. Also, in the process of adding these little details, you may like to go ahead and erase those inner forms like the triangle there for the leg muscle, just to keep things neat and clean because real cats don't walk around with triangles on their upper torso. However, if you don't feel comfortable erasing them, you can leave them in there for now. It's all part of the learning process. Also, at this point, if you are dissatisfied with your sketch of the cat, you can go ahead and erase it and start a new one, or you don't even have to erase it. You could keep your progress, and you could just select this cat and move it off to the side, try it again. And as you do this, you will see a steady progress in how you're improving each time you reattempt the drawing. Believe me, the more you draw, the better you get. So that is pretty much it for this lesson. You can go ahead and continue sketching the CAT and add more details as you see fit in the next lesson, we will be moving on to a slightly even more difficult pose, and I will get into slightly more advanced construction ideas for the form. Thank you for joining me, and I will see you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 5. Lesson 04 - Sketching a playful cat with foreshortening: In this lesson, we have a much more difficult pose. This time we have a cat lying down and bending its body and it has its paws in front of it. We're going to start off this analysis a little bit different because we are going to start drawing the hip line, the shoulder line, and we're going to incorporate a spine line, which will help us better gauge how the body is flowing. This structure is pretty common in human figure drawing, and we can use it here again for cats. Basically, these marks are going to show you the direction that the body is moving in in its different points. This will help you keep the flow of the body better. Now, along with these new structural helpers, you can still find the shapes here in the body. For example, here around our bar marks, we can go ahead and form the torso as two trapezoids. Now let's focus on the lower body. Here, the thighs of the cat are essentially almost perfect ovals. If you plot out the thighs, you can then start going in and filling out the rumpatumps and the little side of the body here on the other side. Then we'll eventually move on to the feet. The feet have some foreshortening, but don't be alarmed because it's very easy. We just draw two ovals on the top, and then two little sausages underneath the ovals. But remember, they're not really sausages and we don't eat cats. And similarly, the fore legs will be treated in somewhat the same way, except one is outstretched and the other one has a little bit of foreshortening. Now, lastly here, I'm going to go ahead and draw in the spine line, which is basically going to run down the center of the animal. Normally, you would do this in the beginning, right, whenever you're doing your little marks to show the direction of the upper and lower torsos, it's usually a little more helpful at that point, but at any time, you can add it in and it'll be helpful. Basically, putting in the spine line adds a very simple visual representation of exactly the flow of the body. So at this point, we've analyzed everything, so let's go ahead and give it a try and get drawing. I'm setting up this time on a completely new document because I used too much of the other space in the document to draw. I also still have the reference image up, but it's off to the side and you can't see it. But we will still circle back to our shapes and re analyze the finished drawing at the end. At this point, as in previous lessons, I'm going to go ahead and speed up my drawing process just a little bit so you can watch the whole process tolrably and then we will circle back and rediscuss everything. So here my sketch of the cat is pretty much complete, and I'm going to actually move it off to the side here. And what I'd like to do is I thought the cat also might look cute with its eyes closed. So what I plan to do is I'm just going to copy and paste it, and then I can make detailed changes without changing the original sketch. And here you can see that it does look pretty darn cute with its little eyes shut as well. So because this was a considerably more difficult lesson, let's go ahead and review the shapes in the drawing. For this, I've just copy and pasted the same figure for a third time, and now I can write over it with all of our shape analysis. So let's go ahead and begin. Again, we have a circle for the head, and this cat's head is really very circular, compared to some of the other cats we've been drawing that had a slightly more diamond shaped head. Again, we have triangles for ears. And the belly of our kitty is kind of a little more rounded than we actually had in our original analysis. You can still draw the bars to find out the directions of the torsos, but torso, rather. There's not more than one. They aren't caterpillars. Oh, but that would be a really good joke. Anyway, getting back on track, we have a trapezoid connecting the head to the round belly. Again, the legs are like little sausages and here is our lower trapezoid that is the lower portion of the cat with a couple little sausage legs and a couple little oval feet. Again, remember that the thighs are actually two ovals within that trapezoid, and that's what helps you get that nice smooth shape. So how do you feel you did? If you're not happy with your first drawing, just try and try again. But don't be too hard on yourself, especially if this is completely new to you. So I'm going to go ahead and end this lesson here. And in Lesson five, we're actually going to, um, take a little detour, I guess you could say, and we're going to focus specifically on drawing the cat's face. We're going to get in there into the nitty gritty and draw some nice little details of the cat's face because as we all know, that's kind of the most important thing of the cat. I mean, we like all of the cat, for sure, but we always like to see their cute little faces. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this lesson, and I will see you in the next one. Bye bye. 6. Lesson 05 - Sketching a front facing cat portrait: So for this lesson, we're changing gears a little bit, and we're going to be focusing specifically on the proportions of a cat's face. So let's start off by doing the same thing that we did with all of the cat figure drawings and do a little analysis. To begin with, we do have a circular head here and you can use the cross hair technique to figure out where the centerline of the cat's face is and where the center line is across the width of the face, which is usually where the eyes will line up. This is very similar to setting up a portrait drawing for humans. You can use the same technique here. So I'm going to begin this sketch by plotting out the roundish oval shape and putting the crossbars across the face. So I know where the nose line is and the eyeline is. Now, I personally like to start with drawing the eyes first and then using those eyes for the proportion to go bloom out from there. I will show you what I mean here in a minute. So here is one rule of proportion when it comes to cats. There is almost exactly one eye width of space between their two eyes. The second point is the cats tear ducts at the inner corners of their eyes will align down with the outer edges of their nose, and it'll kind of go in a little bit kind of like a little inverted trapezoid. Now using these proportional guidelines, we can start filling out the face a little bit more. Another proportional guide you can count on is that the inner corners of the ears will match up with the inner corners of the eyes or the cat's tear ducts, like so. I will now leave you with a slightly sped up version of my sketching process so that you can see how I pulled everything together without it taking too long. But I would also like to remind you that it's okay to use all of the tools at your disposal and to make adjustments as you go along. And again, if your drawing isn't coming out perfect, like mine wasn't on this day because my sketching game was not on point, it doesn't really matter because you're learning something. And so as long as you're learning, you're going to get better. So just keep at it. Mm Okay, I have a couple more proportional notes to share with you. The first being that the cat's muzzle is very round, like an oval here. And inside that oval, the upper part of the muzzle on either side of the nose is kind of like a small ball. Next important thing of note is that when the cat is facing you, the edges of the muzzle will line up with the center of the cat's pupils. With this knowledge, you should be able to faithfully recreate a cute little kitty. And remember, perfection is not required. Go ahead and enjoy the process and let your own style come out. With all of this said, I am going to end this lesson here, and in the next lesson, we are going to tackle drawing the cat's portrait from the side and also dig into the three quarter view just a little bit. Well, I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I will see you in the next one. Bye bye. 7. Lesson 06 - Sketching a cat portrait in profile and 3/4 view: So here we are for the sixth and final lesson of how to draw cats. The first cat we're gonna be focusing on is this lovely little profile of a cat. Again, we're going to do a little bit of analysis, and we can see that the cat's head is, again, very round. It kind of looks like an extra chubby sunflower seed that's upside down. And then the muzzle is another little trapezoid that just boops right out of the face. The next important feature is that in profile, the ears become more three dimensional. So you're essentially drawing a couple little slanty pyramids to get the ears correct. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and get straight on into drawing. Here I'm just trying to get the basic shape of the cat's head down and adding that little muzzle out the front. And similarly, as I did with the cat's full face portrait, I'm going to start with the eyes next. Now, remember that when the eyes are in profile, they're not going to be completely round. They're going to be kind of like a flattened oval. I happen to notice that my sketch is looking a little too downward, so I just make a little adjustment and get it back on track. After I've got the eye fleshed out, it's time to figure out where the ear is. Now, what I like to do is just draw a little guideline out from what I consider the inner corner of the eye and the outer corner of the eye to help me find the inner corner and the outer corner of the ears. Then, of course, we're doing a pyramidal shape so we can get that nice three D effect of the ear. Now I'm going to just groove into my drawing mode and I'm going to share a little sped up version so you don't have to watch for 1 million years. All right. See you in a moment. All right, so I want to explain the ear thing just a little bit better. One of the proportional cues that I follow, it's not like a tried and true rule is following from the outer corners of the eye to the outer corners of the ears, and it will kind of make this trapezoid shape, as you can see, with the pink lines on the reference photo. And I just find them helpful for me to figure out where the ears should fall. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, you can throw it to the wind. A couple more shapes you can look for in the cat's profile is the nose as a triangle, of course, but it's kind of flattened. And you can look for the upper lip of the muzzle, and then another thing you can look for is the cheekbone area of the cat. This is more for getting into shading, but it can also help you put together your cat's proportions. Now, here is a more advanced pose for drawing the cat's face. This is about three quarters view, so you can't see all of the cat's face on the right hand side when you're looking at the cat. So let's go ahead and do some analysis before we begin drawing. It's going to be really important to get our analysis nailed down since this is one of the more difficult poses. Here, the cat's eyes are very round, and the one on the right is squished a little bit. Then we want to find the muzzle, which, again, is well, in this instance, it's kind of a bean shape. And then the little lower jaw mouth just sort of juts out from the middle of that space. Another thing you can do is you can do the middle line, again, just like we did the cross hairs on the front facing cat. You can do the same thing here to find the center line of the cat's face. Again, the ears are triangles, and the ear to the right hand side of this portrait is a little bit three D. So again, you're going to have a little funky pyramid. Another helpful feature to make note of is drawing a little ey eline in so you can find the center of the face horizontally. Alright, with these basic starting points in mind, I'm going to go ahead and start doing a little bit of a sketching. I'm going to start with an oval for the head of naturally, and I am going to put in the cross hairs for the middle of the face, both vertically and horizontally. Again, as with my other cat portraits, I'm going to start with the eyes as their great basis to get the rest of the proportions to fall into line. So as I noted during the analysis phase, the eye on the right is squished just a little bit and is not as wide as the eye on the left. This is kind of important for getting that three D feeling. If the eye is too large and equal in width to the one on the left, it will look a little less three D. All right. I'm going to go ahead and hit the zoomies again, while I do my little sketching and then we'll come back and we'll talk a little further about proportions. All right, so we're ready to talk a little more about proportions. I wanted to really drive the point home that when you're in a three quarter view, the left hand side of the face, well, in this instance, because the way the cat is facing is going to be about almost twice as wide as the space on the other side of that noseline. It's not quite a precise measurement, but a close enough kind of measurement. Next, I wanted to point out that you could do my little ear trick, which is to connect the outer corners of each ear with the outer corners of each eye. Again, it becomes a trapezoidal shape, and it can help you find the angle of the ears a little bit and just basically keep your proportions tighter. I also happen to notice that my cat's face is a little too wide in the drawing, so I'm just going to use the transform tool to make a few quick adjustments. Again, this is not cheating. You're allowed to use all of the tools that are at your disposal. Feel free to make all the little tweaks and adjustments you want. Finally, one last thing of note here. Whenever you're filling out the cat's whiskers, be sure that you always make one go in the opposite direction. It'll feel more natural, as you can see from the photo, that whiskers are not perfect. So let's zoom out a moment and have a little look at our handiwork. We've done a lot of work in this course. We started out with simple poses, moved on to more advanced poses, did even a little bit of foreshortening, and then we started focusing on how to draw the portraits of the cats. If you made it through all these lessons and have a digital or physical sketchbook filled with little cat drawings, give yourself a big old pat on the back. You did it. But before we end this class, I want to go out on a little cartoony note. Now that you have the basics down, you can go ahead and explore a few illustrative styles. You can give it a go at trying some more cartoony and cute cats. You can do things like exaggerate the face shape. For example, this cat here has a very exaggerated diamond shaped face that looks a bit like a piece of Oigeri. You can get out there and start experimenting with cats of all different shapes and sizes. You can also begin playing with proportions a little bit within reason. There are a few guidelines, again, you are going to want a total eye width between the two eyes and so on. But yeah, you can get out there and start experimenting. And if you want to make really cute cartoony cats, be sure that you draw the nose really close to the eyes because that just makes it cuter. And of course, very large eyes add a cuteness factor. I hope you enjoyed this class and I hope you will get out there and populate the world with a ton of really cute cat drawings. I thank you for joining me on this journey, and please feel free to check out my other classes if you like my teaching style. I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.