Sketchbook Snack: Drawing Catty Cats

1. Introduction: Welcome to Sketchbook SNAC drawing Caddy Cats. A Sketchbook snack is an exercise that you can do in your sketchbook anytime you need something light, easy, or fun to do. It's perfect for when you have art block or feeling overwhelmed or when you just don't know what to draw. Hi, I'm Jenny Maclyn. I'm a software engineer, turned Illustrator and surface pattern designer. I know firsthand how frustrating it can feel to be burnt out, overwhelmed or just stuck with my art. Through much trial and error, I found that the best solution to these feelings is just to stay loose and have a little bit of fun playing in my sketchbook. Too often, we get stuck in a cycle of creating perfect finished pieces for our portfolios or social media, and we forget to take the time to create art just for ourselves. We really need the time for play and experiment in order to grow as artists, but it's all too easy to forget to it. That's why I created this series of classes. Playing in our sketchbooks is not only refreshing for our creativity, but it's also fun. If you spend the class giggling over how silly looking your catty cats are, then mission accomplished. Cats are known for being mischievous masters of the Sidi and haughty, yet cuddly creatures. At any given time, they can be found snoozing in a patch of sunlight, accidentally on purpose, tripping you as you're walking down the hall or plotting world domination. They're also one of the most fun things to draw in your sketchbook, which is why we're gonna be drawing them in this class, but we won't be drawing just any ordinary. No, we're going to honor that mischievous nature and draw the caddiest attitudiest cats around. We'll start with a quick warm up exercise and talk briefly about shape and how we can use it to make our cats. Next, we'll discuss the basics of expression, and I'll demonstrate how you can show off your cat's attitude to maximum effect. Then we'll pick out some materials and colors from supplies you already have on hand. Finally, we'll start our project together. In this class, your final project will be a double page spread full of caddy cats, giving you their best side eye and their rudest too. Are you ready to draw some caddy cats and have fun in your sketchbook at the same time? Join me in class. 2. Warm Up: Anything Can Be a Cat: Literally anything can be a cat. Don't believe me. Let's prove it. In this warm up exercise, we're going to take everyday objects and turn them into cats. Why bother with a warm up? Well, just like with a physical activity like a sport, warming up before we draw or paint helps us do our best work. It helps loosen us up both physically and mentally. It also helps take away some of the stress of the fear of a blank page or not knowing where to start. For this warm up, you'll need your sketchbook or a piece of paper, a waterproof pen or marker, and a light colored marker or watercolors. Go ahead and pause the lesson here to go gather your supplies if you don't already have them. On our sketchbook page, we're going to start by drawing the outlines of a few everyday objects. Let's go ahead and start with something nice and simple that everybody is familiar with and that's just the box. That's our first one. That's it. I'm going to pop a list on the screen here and you can choose from that list, or you can follow along with me or you can come up with your own ideas as well. I started with this box and now I'm going to do a cloud. Let's do a cactus house plant next, and let's do a car, a very simple cartoony car. Remember, this is just a warm up, so I don't want you to be too concerned about making your most artistic pieces. We just want nice simple shapes. It can be messy. It can be loose. It can be like, is that a car? It's fine. All of it is fine. This is just a warm up. It's a nice little ice breaker to ease us into our drawing practice for the day the cars. A lot of windows, I guess. I bought a lamp. That's a nice everyday object. And we'll do a mug. Perfect. We have six objects here, and now we're going to transform them from everyday objects into cats. Let's go ahead and switch over to Bar Marker and I'll show you now. Starting with our box, the first thing that we're going to do to turn our everyday objects into cats is add a few key features. In real life, cats have a lot of variety, but most share a set of unique features that our brains can quickly scan and identify as a cat. For example, pointy ears, whiskers, and a long swishy tail. We're going to use those features or a combination of those features and create our cats out of everyday object. Let's go ahead and make a list in our sketchbook of these identifying features. We've got tiny ears, squishy body, squishy tail, whiskers, button nose, big eyes. We can use a combination of these features on each of our objects in order to transform them into a cat. We don't need all of them, but as long as we have enough, our brains will be able to look at the object and see it as a cat. Might be a cat lamp, but it will still be a cat. Let's go ahead and I'll show you what I need. I'm going to jump it back over with our marker, starting with the box, in the top left corner, we're going to drag in some color like so, and we're just going to fill that shape in, but we're going to extend the shape a little bit further to make these point ears. Let's do the same thing out the back of the box. To make the tail. For the first one, I'm going to go step by step and show you exactly how I'm doing it, and then I'll speed up the video to do the rest so that you can get to your exercise faster. We've got the marker, and we want to make sure it's dry too before we try to draw over it, otherwise, it can get a little bit funky. But we've got these pointy ears and the long swishy tail. Let's go ahead and add in some eyes, a nose, whiskers, and we can draw the outline of the ears and the tail. Then we have our first cat out the box. Now I'm going to go ahead and speed up the video. What did I tell you? Anything can be a cat, right? Now it's your turn. Choose 5-7 object and transform them into cats just like you saw on this demonstration. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll talk about expression and how to give our cats the most attitude. See you there? And 3. Creating Maximum Expression with Simple Features: In this lesson, we're going to talk about expression and do a very simple exercise to get you comfortable drawing different expressions on your cats faces. We'll use very simple features, and I'll show you a few tips and tricks so that you can get started with expressions, even if you've never done it before. Before we get started, a really important note. Since we're drawing catty cats that are uniquely yours, I want you to take the following lesson as a guideline, but stick with what feels right for you. If you already know how you like to draw cats, eyes or expression, stick with that. If you're a beginner and you aren't really sure where to start, then you can follow along with me. But I want to encourage you to do a little bit of experimentation during this lesson, as well, so you can see which eye shapes, which expressions, and other things that will ultimately contribute to your unique style that you find enjoy. I'll be giving you some pointers and general tips about expression, but you can take those and apply them to your own style. If you don't feel up to experimenting right now, that is totally fine. You can just follow along with it. It's something that you'll get more comfortable with as you continue growing and exploring as an artist. Let's go ahead and get started. You just need a piece of paper like this or your sketchbook and something to draw with. It could be anything at all, a crayon, a pencil, a pen. I'm just going to use this pen here. And what I want you to do is start by drawing four circles or ovals on your page. Just like this. They can be as wonky as you want. They are for demonstration. Purposes only. Okay, so here we have four very wonky oval shapes. Now, what I want you to do is add ears to each oval. Great. Now we've got the basic shape of a cat's head. For the first two, I want you to draw very simple dot eyes. So let's go ahead and do that. Okay, so now we have very simple dot eyes on the first two cats and nothing on these cats. That's because I'm going to let you fill in the eyes on here. We're gonna talk a little bit about how you can use the eyes to convey different expression. The first, let's go ahead and add a nose. To each of our cats. Okay. And the nose is going to stay the same for all these because it's such a simple feature. It's just a little dot. Before we get into expresion, let's talk about eyes really quickly. So I'm going to just make a little line over here. And we're going to draw some eyes. You can use two dots like this or ovals. You could do little U shapes like this, which usually indicates that the eyes are closed. You could do the opposite of the U shape, which is an upside down U, and that's usually also the eyes are closed, but it's more of a happy expression. You could do Xs. You could do straight lines. All of these are very simple, almost emoji eyes, right? But in combination with the other things that we're going to talk about, you can use these different eyes in order to convey a different expression in your cat. So these are all very simple. You could also do circles. I like to do empty circles sometimes. You could do circles with pupils. And of course, if you add pupils, the direction that they're looking is going to also help you convey expression. You could do simple almond shape like this. I mean, you could really do anything you want here as long as you're making eyes of some kind. I want you to use the one that you like the most. If you have a favorite already, stick with that one. But if you're new to drawing or you're new to drawing eyes, you know, pick a couple experiment and see which ones that you like the most for your cats. Okay, so let's go back over to these guys. What I want to show you is how these two look very similar. Right now, they're giving the exact same kind of neutral expression. Go to change this by adding one element, which is our secret ingredient for our cat's attitude. And that is eyebrows. So right here, this cat looks pretty neutral and happy, right? And we're going to accentuate that. We're going to give him some nice elevated curved eyebrows, just like that. You can already see the difference between these two. This one has a lot more expression than this one now. And next on this one, we're going to do an angry cat. We're just going to add two simple downward slashes for the eyebrows. And now look at what a dramatic change that made from the previous one. Right? Let's fill in these, as well. I'm going to do the closed eye expressions here, so we'll do the Us for this one, and I'm going to do the lines for this one. Okay? And we're also going to add eyebrows to these. And this guy, we're going to do kind of like a smug attitude. So he's gonna just have these neutral, slightly upward tilted eyebrows. And then this guy is just basically the expressionless emoji, right? He is annoyed. You've just made a dad joke and he does not think it's funny. So we're just going to add a straight line like that. Right across. And you can see that unibrow shape adds its own emotion, too. You don't have to do the straight line fully across. You could also do just straight eyebrows. Other options that we could have added to this is, you know, a curved upward curved eyebrow like this, which would have made a sad expression. Let me just draw in the eyes there. Another really important one for cats is the si die, which is just a straight line and a little pupil shape there. You can also do that with closed dots like that. Okay. And now let's add one final feature to these cats in order to give them just a little bit more expression in each in. We're going to add the mouth. Now, cats mouths are generally pretty simple. You've got the nose and these two little lines like this here. You can do just like with the eyes and the expression, you can do whatever you want for your cats. I'm just giving you some simple examples. So I'm going to stick with this basic formula for these four cats here, but you could also do, you know, something like the smirk, the line, something like that. I think we'll give this guy a smirk. But I'm going to try to translate it to this cat shape. So the first cat is happy, so we're going to just curve those lines upward into a little smile like that. And this guy is angry, so we're just going to leave those short straight lines just like that. And then this guy's feeling a little smug, so we're going to do one line down. And then one line curved. So he's kind of doing a little smirk there. And then this guy, we're going to continue that expression listing. We're just going to do a little thing like that. Great. And that is a very quick demonstration on how you can use simple features like these in different combinations to create a variety of expressions in your cats. If you want to experiment more, you'll find an expression et sheet, as well as some additional references in the workbook. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll pick out some colors and materials to work with in our final project. 4. Materials & Color: In this lesson, we're going to pick out some colors and materials to use in our fornal project. I'll show you what I'm using. And if you have those supplies, you can use those, but I want you to substitute anything that you don't have. You don't need to go out and buy anything new for this project. The whole point is that it is easily done at any time, and you can substitute materials super simply. Since we want our sketchbook snack to be easy and relaxing, we're going to use a very limited color palette. We're going to choose just one main color for all of our cats, and I'll be using watercolor, but you can use gouache, marker, acrylic ink, even, whatever you have on hand. I've gone ahead and gathered a couple of options from my own supply. For my sketchbook, I'm going to be using the sketchbook that I'm using for our final project, which is this Strathmore soft cover watercolor sketchbook. We're going to clip this open. And what we're going to do now is just try out some of our colors and see what we're feeling today. What is going to make us the most happy to use for our caddy cast. So I've already got some of this watercolor ink here. It's doctor PH Martin's WildoseRadiant, concentrated watercolor. And this is what I have. Here in this little dish. So I'm going to go ahead and try that first and see how that looks. You can see it's already turned my water really pink, so that's gonna be a challenge to mix with anything else. And it's very vibrant. I do like that a lot. See how much pigment we can get with just a little bit on the brush. Now, let's see. I'm gonna go for a little bit of a mix here. This blue with a little bit of this paint to create, kind of like a periwinkle lavender effect. I really like that. Let's try one of our other supplies. Next, I'm going to I've got this Derwent ink tense paint pan set, and it has some really nice colors in here. I'm going to try out a blue color next to see how that look. I'm using the water brush that comes with that set. So that's a nice option as well. And if we add a little more water to that, we can get it even lighter. Which is going to help in our final project because we want to add some details on top of the base color. So if we have a lighter color, that's going to be helpful there. Let's go ahead and try out another color. So this is the set that this blue I used earlier came from. I think I'm going to go ahead and try this teal color here. I think it's Malachite put that down. That is a really nice color. Now, another option if you don't have any paint or ink is you could also use markers like we used in our warm up. So that's gonna work for you just as well. It might just take a little bit longer to fill in the shape, but that's okay. So just use whatever you have on hand. I do like these colors here. So it looks quite nice together. Some other options that you might have at home is an acrylic ink like this, or I also have this pantone ink, which is a refill for the pantone markers. But it does a really nice job as using it like an ink or a liquid watercolor or something like that. It's quite nice. If you have any of those on hand, that's gonna work for this project, as well. Let's go ahead and try this guy just to see what he looks like. That's really nice. I don't know if I'm feeling red for this particular project, but I can see that working out really well, as well. Okay, I think we've got enough options here. Let's move on to picking out our accent colors. I'm gonna go with this between this pink and this purple here. I'm going to do both. I'm going to do both of these for the main color. And then let's see, for the accent color, I need something that's going to show up on both of these. I want to make sure I have something that will work for the cheeks, and you can see how this fades into. You can't even see on camera where it goes. Yeah. See, you can barely see it there. So that's not gonna work because we want to make sure we have enough contrast between our accent color and our main color. Otherwise, you aren't going to be able to see any of the details we draw on our cats. I'm going to go ahead and try this darker pink color. That one's a little bit better. I think if we watered this down more, then we'd be able to get more of that contrast there as well. You can see it in that one. That could be an option. Let's see. I do like this. I think this would be good for our linework. Another option is using a fine liner like we used in our warm up, so we can test that out as well. See if we can find another accent color for this one, though. That could work for some details, maybe like stripes or spots. But what I'm really looking for here is something to use for the blush on the cats, and that's what I usually use that light pink for, but it's not quite showing up. I'll keep some options open, and we'll go with the darker color when the watercolor is more pigmented, and then we can maybe use the lighter color when it's more watered down. Oh, go ahead and choose your main color first. I'm going with these two. I would say keep it to three at the max. One would be the simplest, and it's going to result in a beautiful page. So if you want to keep things nice and simple, go ahead and pick one. And then after you've chosen your main color, try and find some accent colors. I think two is a good number there. Something that's going to look good for your line work. Like this is what the ultramarine colored pencil we're going to use there. And then you can also use your fine liner there as well. So I would say, just go ahead and pick those out and then maybe one additional color for details like the cheeks or spots or any other details that you want to add Cheer cats. If you didn't follow along with this demonstration, go ahead and pick out your own colors and materials from your supplies. I'll meet you in our next lesson where we'll get started on our final project. See you there? 5. Final Project: It's time for our final project. As a reminder, you'll need the following materials and supplies. A sketchbook, watercolor or other materials to make shapes of color, a cup of water, not for drinking, a brush, color pencils or a fine liner or something similar, and a smidge of patience while we literally wait for paint to dry. Go ahead and pause the video to gather everything. I'll wait here. Ready to go? Let's draw some caddy cats. Alright, let's jump in. So to start, I'm just going to get a little bit of this color on my paintbrush, I'm start with those blobby shapes. Because, like we learned in our warm up, pretty much anything can be a cat as long as you add enough of those recognizable features in order for our brain to see it and go, Oh, that's a cat. So once we've drawn our main shape here, then we can add in an ear. A ear will be here. Let's do some pause here. Here we go. That's our first shape done. Now I'm gonna switch to that purple color I created in the last lesson. For the next shape, and I'll just alternate between the two as I go. And remember, our main goal here is to stay loose and just have some fun. So don't worry too much about being anatomically correct. If you're familiar enough with cats that you feel comfortable posing them or doing, you know, some action poses or something like that, please feel free. But if you're more of a beginner or you just want to have a very relaxing session, you can go ahead and follow along with me just doing blobs that will then turn into cats once we've added those features. So here we go for the second cat. You need a little more pink in there. Well, that's quite strong. That's okay. We're just gonna go with the flow and see where the paint takes us here. A little more water to fill in these gaps. And I'm just gonna extend this shape. And let's do tail going downwards. I'm letting my colors mix on the page a little bit here. If you prefer to have the pink or the purple already mixed up, you can put it in a separate palette like this. You don't need to just mix it on the fly like I'm doing here. And like I mentioned, if you're more of a beginner, sticking to one color is going to be a friend. I'll keep it nice and simple. I just really liked the combination of these two, so I decided to go for it, but absolutely no pressure to add in a second color if you don't want to. On the back legs here. And cats might be a little wonky, a little weird, a little silly, and that's okay. Now we're ready to add all of our linework and details. I'm going to be using this ultramarine prisma color, and I'm going to just start by doing the linework around the cats and we'll add in the expressions. And then, same as before, I'm going to do one or two examples in real time with you, and then I'll speed up the video so you can see everything before you get started on your own project. Let's jump in. So for this cat, I know that I have a second ear over here. So I just want to make sure I draw that in with the lines. Now that we're working over our shapes, we can smooth some of those shapes out if we want. Math them as they are either way is fine. This is your sketchbook spread. So there we have the first chat outline done, we're going to give him will nose and He's the dot eyes and his whiskers. A little frumpy face there. I think let's give him some stripes, as well. Let's see if we can do some cheek, if it's gonna be too dark, it looks like it might be a little too dark. We could come in with a posca pen and a light pink, and that would be good, then. You will try that. And move on to this little fella. Okay, we'll do this and Bond dies here. Los He's gonna be more of a startled looking cat. And I'm gonna go ahead from here and just do the rest and I'll speed them up, and I'll meet you back when it's time to add in defile touches. Now we have our initial linemrk. I'm gonna grab a pink posca pan, and we're going to try that. It's too light on these prickle ones. Let's let that dry, then we can change that. But in the meantime, go ahead and add some extra details to some of so. Now, we're going to try and fix these lighter ones. I think we can do that with a second cover. That second hoding is really gonna help it stand out. Okay, so there we have our cheeks and details, and we've got an entire page full of cats. And the last thing that we're going to do is take our secondary color here, and we're just going to add some little blurrises to the page. It needs blank spots. And if your Posca marker is still wet, like mine, be careful that you don't accidentally drag your hand through it. All done. Now it's your turn. Go ahead and complete your project, and I'll see you in the final lesson. 6. Next Steps: Congratulations. You did it. How did it go? Do your cats look like they're plotting world domination? I hope you had fun filling pages in your sketchbook full of catty cats and drawing along with me. I'm so glad you joined me in class. If you'd like to keep drawing, check out my other class sketchbook snack drawing goofy dog. Where you can get another delightful sketchbook snack just like this, except drawing some goofy dogs. I would love it if you would share your work so I can see all of your lovely mischievous cats. Be sure to submit a project here on Skill Share and feel free to tag me on Instagram if you share it there as well. You'd like to be notified about future classes that I release, go ahead and follow me here on Skill Share. Thank you so much for joining me in class. I hope you had fun and I'll see you next time.