Sketching Cats: A 3-Day Sketching Challenge

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to this class on sketching cats. In this class, we'll go through three different days where we'll draw cats in different ways and situations. On day one, we'll be focusing on cats faces and emotions and expressions, and it's all about keeping things simple, more like a warm up, you start getting used to the idea of sketching some cats. On day two, we'll level up a bit and draw cats performing different activities. Different cat activities like sleeping, playing, grooming, and just general cat stuff. Then finally, on the tree, we'll re imagine cats as people. We'll be drawing cats in a more anthropomorphic way and imagine them doing perhaps more human activities such as gardening, painting, and others. For each day, I will give you a reference board so you can use those as references or you can find your own. I'll be also giving you one assignment per day as well some templates to help you wild and so you start your assignments. As for the materials you'll need for this class, it's very simple. All you need is a sketchbook. It can be one that you already own and use. It can be of any size you want, and if you don't really have a sketchbook and don't want to get one right now, then a piece of paper will work well or even a notepad. As for the tools you'll be drawing with, you can choose whichever you're more comfortable with. It can be a pen, a fine-liner, a pencil, markers, color pencils, whatever you want and enjoy using. I do recommend, however, for you to use something that you already comfortable with. It's a bit less overwhelming for you. But if you want to try something new, don't let me stop you, have fun and use whichever tool and medium you want. Now, are you ready to sketch some cats? Then follow me to the next video and I will see you soon. 2. References & Resources: Hello, and welcome. Now before we start drawing, I just want to tell you about the resources I have for you as well as your assignment. First of all, you can download three different reference boards that we'll use throughout the class. It's one reference board per day, one will be focused on expressions, another one in cats in general performing different activities. And the last one is all about human activities that will transform into GATS. You can download these reference boards for you to use throughout the class. But if you want, you can also find your own references and have fun with those. Now, as for the assignment, it's all very simple. You'll have one assignment per day. For the first day, you'll fill out a page of your sketchbook or the template I gave you with different CAT expressions. For the day two, it's the same thing, one page or even spread if you want with different cat positions and activities. Finally, the third day, you'll fill out a page of your sketchbook with cats acting as humans. Acting out different human activities. It's totally up to you, but the idea is for this to be very actionable, so you can get more comfortable with sketching and sketching out something either simple or a bit more complicated every day. You start loving using your sketchbook more and more. This is it for now and I will see you in the next video. 3. Day 1 - Cat Faces: Hello, and welcome back. We're going to start drawing. This is day one, and today we'll start things very easily with focusing just on a cat's face and drawing different expressions. We're going to make our cats a bit more cartooning and adding more human expressions to them, more human emotions to them. I have here on my computer the reference board opened. You can download that if you want. As you can see, it's all about emosis and even a few drawings I've done sometime ago. Now, of course, you can do more than this. These are just a few examples, and I think it can be really great to go through your phone Imoges and pick some that you enjoy and try to draw them on your guess. Now, as for what I'll be using to draw for today, I'm going to use this pencil fine-liner in orange and this shell ballpoint pen in purple. But you can use whatever you want. The first thing we're going to do is, let's just for now fill the page just with the cats heads just different shapes perhaps the ears pointing in different ways. Focus on that. No facial feature whatsoever. Let's start two point years and then we go down and there we go. One cat face. Now let's draw one that is a bit rounder. There we go. Maybe pointier years, all right. Let's do another. Perhaps the years going a bit lower and don't worry if the heads are perfect or not. This is just a sketch. Let's try another shape, perhaps more like this. There we go, and the years a bit rounder. There we go. Just a few more. Let's try to draw even sadder ears than before. As you can see, my drawings are far from perfect, have fun, right now, I'm just going to change colors and add a few more cat heads here in another column. We can try smaller ears, maybe bigger ears in a smaller face. There we go. We can feel a bit more, can do something like this as well. I like this shape. This is cute. Try out different things. It's always important. Just one more. There we go. So now we can start adding our emotions. Let me see what we have here. All right. Let's start very simple. Just a smiley face. Just two eyes. For the nose, I like to draw a heart shape and we can go ahead and add some patterns here and there. There we go. Simple. Let's see the next one, perhaps laughing, you know. So we can draw the eyes going this way, then the hard shaped nose and our whiskers. There we go. Let's draw a cat winking. One eye round and the other this arrow shape that we did before. I'm just looking at my references and picking one and trying to draw it. There we go. Let's see for this one, let's try perhaps an angry one so let me see, I have an angry one there. There we go. Just two lines, one on each side. Let's try to keep the molt down instead of going outwards. So it looks very angry. There we go. This one, I like the one where he's scary. Let's do that. Two very round eyes. Just two circles just like this and now the nose, mouth that is open and in shock. Don't be afraid to add some elements to the side of your cats to emphasize the emotion you're drawing. Now for the last one, let's draw the one with the tongue out, the emosion one, something like this looks a bit like Totoro, but there we go. I think we are done with the orange ones. Let's go for Let's perhaps draw here the insights of the years as well. There we go, right. Let's pick up my purple pen and now we'll fill out the other faces. How do I want to do this? Let's start with this one and I want to draw the one that is sending a kiss. We got something like this. I'm following the Moji a little hard. There we go. That's very human of him. Next one. It's draw this one crying perhaps. Two lines one to each side for the eyes. The running tears. I want to draw one of those here with a tear here. I'll draw the tear right away. I'm following the emoji, so an arch for the eyes. Don't worry about being perfect. These are just sketches. Just have fun and if you feel like one of these drawings are not really great for you, you can just repeat the drawing and try it in a different way. Four more. Draw the one that is crying a little bit, two eyes are open this time, heart shaped nose, mouth going down. And then we got two small tears in here, Bertin. If you want add some stripes, some spots here and there to your cats to make them a little bit more unique. If you want you can even add color to these drawings. This is a space for you to experiment. This is a space for you to make mistakes, to try new things, experiment as much as you can. If you want you can mix mediums, it's totally fine and totally up to you. I'm going to draw the one that is shocked with the hands on the face. I'm going to draw here some pause that looks so silly. What else? What am I missing here? The other angry one, so we have this with the eyes close, but let's try the one with I don't have any more angry ears, but that's fine to something like this. He looks like a big grumpy cat and just one more. Let's do the hard eyes. Let's finish with a very cute one. Two hearts for the eyes, then our nose and a cute mouth. There we go. Now, if you want, I like to do something which is decorating my page. And how do I do that? I'll simply pick the pens I'm using and I'll just start adding some decorations like some stars, for example. I'm not perfect with them, just scribbles. What else we can try some circles. Inspiring myself in the pattern over there, so some bolls for playing. Just have fun, to feel I like to feel my pages very busy. I always like to go in and add some decorations just for the fun of it and for my page to be very busy because I find that very cute. In general, we can also go for perhaps some spirals. Here we go. Just have fun. It can be other kind swirls. What kind of doodles do you like to add to your pages and just throw that? This is it as you can see, this is done, my pages are filled with cats and some decoration. As for this part, it's totally up to you. You don't need to do it, but I always find it very fun to do and makes the pages much more cuter. Don't overthink this. Now, for your assignment, don't forget to download the template that I gave you if you want to do that, or just open your sketchbook and fill out a page with different cat expressions. Have fun, take your time, and I will see you in the next video. 4. Day 2 - Cat Activities: Hello, and welcome back. This is going to be day two of sketching some cats. The first day, we started with some cat expressions. We turned our cats a bit more cartooning and portraying some more human emotions. Now for the second day, we're going to work on cats activities. We're going to draw cats performing different activities such as walking around, grooming themselves, just different poses of cats. I have my reference board. Don't forget that you can download this and use for your sketches, or you can find other references that you might find cute to draw or that you just might prefer. This time, since this is a bit more of a complex exercise, we're going to start by using a pencil. We're going to start our sketches with a pencil and I'll just pick one of the skets and start drawing. I'm not sure how many cats I can fit in here, but that's fine. We'll just do our best. I'm going to start with a cat that is on its back legs. I'm going to start here with an ellipse for the head and a triangle for the ear. Now we're going down a trapezium shape, and then we have the get going downwards, something like this, and then we have the back legs like this. First shapes are done. We also have the tail showing up here behind. And now for the arm, so we got something like this and then then going like this, one arm, and now we got here another paw showing right here, and then all we are missing is the feet. Something like this. Right? And there we go. Our shapes are done. Now I want to go with my pen and add the details and just reorganize my drawing so it's not just shapes. Of course, remember that this can be very, very messy. These are just sketches, so you don't need to be too perfect about this. I'm just going over all the shapes here and there we go. One cat is done. Let's go to the next. Let's speak up our paso once again. Let's try the cat that is licking his back leg, his foot. I think we can fit him here. Again, an ellipse to triangles for years. We got here a foot right going this way, and then we have here this curve and then another one here. Just looking at your image and drawing it. Draw what you see. We got here one leg and the other is coming from here and appearing right here, got here All right. And we do got a tail appearing here, a very bushy tail. All right. Again, pick up my pen, that here. Here, the other one of the bus. Then we got another point here. See how messy I'm being with this. These are just quick sketches. We got the bushy tail right there. Pattern. If you're feeling like it, there we go, very messy. Let's go for the next. I think I'm going to draw the cat that is just walking around here at the bottom of my page. This is very simple. We got here this long shape, almost like tangle, then we got this leg here, the tail going up. I don't have the rest of the space, but that's fine. So we got here this other leg and this one in the front going something like this, and then we got our ellipse for the head and this head is a bit too big, but we'll fix that in when we do our final lines and then we got here the other leg going this way. This is probably the simplest pose. It's very normal. There's nothing much happening here. So now I'm just going with my pen, and I forgot about the whiskers here. I always like to draw the whiskers. Now we just draw we just go over all our lines. And you can skip this step. If you want you can just draw with the pencil and leave it as it is. But going back with pen. The thing is that you basically practice more because you're repeating the same lines. It's a good way to practice and get better at drawing your cats. There we go, adding more stripes. I think they're all well, no, not all of them have sport stripes, but I got to be honest with you, I really like drawing the stripes on the cat. It's my favorite pattern to draw. All right. Next, let's go to the next page because I'm not sure this is going to be enough space, so I just rather go for a new page. I want to draw the helllesscAt. Let's start with that. This time we got a bit of a different head shape, so more triangular. And then we got our ears and we got this spot here in front of the face. There we go. Now we got this neck area here. There we go, and then we have here this curve. Is it more centuated bit more like this. There we go, and we go, connects here and now we got here the other arm. We can't really see the rest of the paw here, but somewhere here in this place and then we got the back legs. Again, we don't really see the paws there, but they're there. And now we got this very curl tail here. All right. Obviously, when we're doing these kind of drawings, we're not going to get things 100% right. That's normal. We're doing just very fast drawings. The idea here is not to get perfection is just to practice getting to know a few new poses, just practice the shapes of drawing some cats. So don't worry too much about that. If you want, you will then able to just pick one of these poses and redraw it again and take a longer time. Pick one of them that you really like. And then you can practice more and better because here the purpose is not to have a great drawing. We're just doing quick doodles. We're just having some fun and drawing some cats. We're not aiming for a perfect drawing here. There we go. I really like this one. It's probably my favorite. Also, I did forget to bring an eraser. Actually, I do recommend for you to just ignore your erasers because then it gets a bit too tempting to fix the mistakes. But obviously when you are doing the second drawing on top of the pencil, it might get a little bit hard to read. If you want, you can then afterwards erase your pencil lines if you want. At the same time, I think it does look good to have both of those drawings. The first sketch and the second sketch, it does have a more authentic look. Again, this is your sketchbook, so you don't want to have or you don't need to have this very clean look and perfect look. It's totally up to you. I think this time, I will leave my lines here. Both of my drawings because I like how it looks. Now, just one more cat here and I really like the orange cat at the bottom. And I think I'm going to draw him because look at that. That's a very relaxed cat. Let's start with a circle, but it is a bit pointy at the end. See, look at all these lines and circles. It's fine. This is just a sketch. We do have here this kind of shape, and here we got one paw going this way, like this. I hope maybe I drew him a bit too much to decide that, well, Again, I don't have any razor, so that's a bit too light for me, and then we have here the rest of the flat and the bow, I don't think I can draw the whole bow here, but that's all right. We have his belly here full of hair. Look at that. Then we got here the tail. At least I got enough space for the tail. So very messy, as you can see, very quick, just a few lines and it is done. He does look a bit angry like he doesn't want to be in this picture at all. He's a little bit fat. My version is even looking a bit cartoony, which I find very fun. This is done. And now I can just go in, add some color perhaps to my drawing, we can once again add some decoration to the pages before, just like we taught before. This is obviously all very optional. It's totally up to you and what you like on your sketchbook. I do really like to add some color to it most of the time. So just like before, I'm just going to add here. So decorations so take your time. Don't forget to download the reference board and then to fill out the template page I gave you with some cat sketches. Or if you want, use your sketchbook, just then take a picture and post your assignment, and I will see you in the next video. 5. Day 3 - Cats As People: Hello, and welcome back. This is going to be the third day of sketching cats or the third exercise. If you're doing this in a whole day, it's totally up to you and today it's going to be a bit more of a free exercise. We're going to draw cats as people or more specifically, going to draw a cat portraying some more human activity. I have here my reference board and we got here a few examples. We got perhaps a gardener, a barista, a doctor, someone working on a computer, someone playing the guitar. Someone reading a book, drinking coffee and painting. The idea is to pick some of these and draw your cats performing that activities. I'm going to pick up my pen and I'm going to start with the Gardner, I think, because it's the first image right there. Don't forget that you can download this reference board if you want, or you can look up for other examples. I'm going to start with the Gardner. And first of all, I think I'm keeping the straw hat. Obviously, I think that is a very good one. I'm drawing here this half circle and the years are poking out. All right. We got here my cat face, whiskers. Of course, there we go, the faces here. Now, I'm going to start drawing here the arms and we're going to draw some overalls. I think the lady there is wearing an apron, but perhaps let's do overalls. Also, let's draw here the rest of the arms. As you can see, I'm keeping here the shapes very, very simple. Now, I think I want to draw some flowers in my character's arms all very, very loose, very simple. There we go. This arm goes down here. This way. What can we add to my other character's arm? Maybe some kind of shovel, a garden shovel, something like this. There we go, very simple, as you can see, we got here some flowers on my cat's arms, some overalls, the head. We could perhaps like draw some gloves. But I don't know. I like the pause, so I think that looks fun. What else could we add here? Let's just add here a bit of a floor, some more flowers here. Just adding some more elements. Use your imagination and draw different things. Just add different elements to your drawing. We can add here some clouds perhaps just to fill out the space, lots of flowers. Of course, the things you add to your characters backgrounds should relate to the character you're drawing and there we go. Very simple. We got here a character, we've added some elements. Now I can go in and add some color. I'm using this highlighter, this green highlighter. You can choose whatever you want, and I just want to add a bit of color to my garden. We can even color here the grass. And as you can see, this is just something that we're doing in a few minutes. You don't need to take too long on each of these drawings. Later on, if you want, you can pick your favorite character, your favorite drawing from the glass, and you can develop and you can develop it. For now, all we want is to put some ideas down. That's the main idea of sketching is just to put some ideas down so that we can later look back and see if you want to develop any of these ideas into another project. I can be just an illustration. Can be a character design for a story that you might have in mind or for a game, any kind of project you want. All we're doing here is putting ideas down, is just to let our imagination flow and have some fun. I should draw the painter. We are drawing here. We are doing a whole lot of artistic activities here. I guess I'm going to draw an artist cat because, come on, I have to. Let's see here again. Let's try another shape for our cat's face a bit more not perfectly round like the other. A different face since we're here, there we go. Yeah, we have here this person that is holding a brush and is being is dressed very normally. I think I'm going to add an apron like we saw in the gardener there because I think that's a thing that a painter should be wearing an apron so we don't make a huge mess, then I think I want her wearing a dress. I'm going to color the dress a little bit. There we go. As you can see, I'm using very simple shapes here and lines and I'm just doing whatever comes to my mind, we have to add an easel with a painting right. What should we draw? Just a simple thing like a house, some clouds here, there we go. Now the brush, I'm forgetting about the brush. There we go. Now here we can add a table with all the paint. First of all, I'm going to add some stripes to theicet some orange stripes, adding some color here, not here, or green just like before. Perhaps the apron is green as well, adding a little bit of color. There we go. And there we go. I got painter cat and a gardener cat. Honestly, I think I could pick up if I had any idea for a children's book with cats as the main characters of my book. I could work on this, I could develop this further and see what comes out of it. But I do have the initial idea down, and as you can see, it took me very few minutes. I have my references. I have the main elements that I would want on a gardener or a painter or a doctor, for example, all I did was pick up my pen and just draw here a few ideas. Now, of course, if you want, you can make alternative ideas for each of the character. If you have the space on your sketchbook or you can fill up more pages. Obviously, do as many sketches as you want, come up with as many characters as you want, once again, take your time don't forget to download the reference board if you want to use it, as well as the template that I gave you, if you want to use that for your assignments, or you can just pick up your sketchbook and draw these sketches on your sketchbook. Yeah, have fun, imagine different characters and I will see you in the next video. 6. Conclusion - Before You Go!: Hello, and welcome back. First of all, congratulations. You finished the class. Give yourself a pat in the back. You did great. Now, if you haven't yet, don't forget to complete your assignments. It's one per day where you just draw whichever theme it is of today. Don't forget to download the templates I gave you if you want to use those instead of a sketchbook and thank you so much for watching this class. Do consider leaving your review so other people like you can find this class and don't forget to check out my other classes. Hopefully, I will see you in some of them and until then keep on drawing.