Painting A Cat in Acrylics | PART 1| HOW TO DRAW A CAT

Hi guys, welcome to Studio Wildlife. This video is going to be the first in a two-part series about how to draw and paint cats. This video is going to cover just the basics of drawing a rough cat, a simplified cat with no real detail, but just as the basis for an underdrawing for a painting. Okay, to start off with you need to draw a circle roughly the size of the head of Now I've put in my circle, I'm just darkening it a little bit so you can see it on the camera. Next I want you to draw the midpoint of your cat's head just with a line and then about halfway down that circle you're going to draw another horizontal line to show where the eyes are going to be. So we can see that that is halfway between the top and the bottom of that circle. Next in the bottom half of that circle you're going to split it in half again. So that you can see we've got a quarter and a quarter of the total height. Next I'm going to split your circle in half again, this time the left and the right sides. The points where the top lines cross are going to be where our eyes are going to be. So I want you to draw a rough circle there. The gap between the eyes should be roughly the same height and the same width as the eye circles that you've just drawn. And either side of the eyes, so to the edges of the head, should be about the same width as well. Okay next I'm just marking the midpoint of the eyes. What you're going to draw is a teardrop shape from the midpoint of the head to the points near the middle of the eyes. So you can see this sort of wide teardrop shape that comes pointed right between the eyes. This is going to be the muzzle of the cat. Next near the base of the eyes to the midpoint of that line you're going to draw a little box. This is going to be for the cat's nose. Underneath that draw a little triangle shape and that is the cat's nose. Next we want to draw the muzzle of the cat, which is like an upside down bird or seagull that you might have drawn when you're a kid. Okay that connects the muzzle to the nose. Now what we want to do is draw two bigger circles attached or around the eyes. This is going to symbolize the cheekbone of the cat and the eyebrow of the cat. Here I'm just connecting the nose to the muzzle. Next we want our ears, so roughly about the same size as the eye circles, above the top of your eyes. What we're then going to do is draw a triangle roughly the same height as those original eye circles and add two smallest triangles either side of the first one. So there we've got the basics of the ears. Next we're going to refine the drawing. So we're going to start by turning the balls of the eye into more oval shapes, so pointed towards the middle of the face. Inside of those we're going to draw smaller circles which are going to represent the iris of the cat's eye and then we're going to do a little downward slanty line that represents the cat's pupil. Next we'll refine the nose. So here you're trying to turn that triangle shape into more of a flat love heart and at either side of the love heart you're going to want to put the two little nostrils. I'm just darkening off the mouth so you can see a little more clearly, refining the shapes of the eyebrows and adding a midline into the head. Next I'm working on the ears. So I'm looking at those shapes that I drew and just curving them off slightly. Okay you can see here the inside of the ears are forming. Next I outline that to give the sense of the outside of the ear. Add some little tufts of hair and there we've got some simple cat ears. Next I'm just refining those cheekbones and adding in some little points or the dots on the muzzle, that's where the whiskers will come out from. Here I am just refining that muzzle, just giving it a bit of tufty fur, adding those looser strands making it a bit tuftier. Loose little bits of fur just blocking in, darkening the outlines, roughing up the sides and there you've got a little cat drawing. Okay next we'll move for a different angle. This time we'll have our cat looking slightly to the left. So again I'm starting with the circle and the cross and I'm putting in the eyes where they're supposed to go. Next I'm drawing the teardrop shape but remember I'm adjusting for perspective so it's now slightly wonkier. I'm adding the little square and the nose and the little muzzle. I'm adding the big circles around the eyes and the middle of the head. Okay there is my circle above the eye circles, there is my original ear triangle, slightly smaller original ear triangle. You can see here I sped up the process a lot bit so I've already practiced with the first one so now I know a little bit more about what I'm doing. Adding the little dots for the whiskers, I'll add some little whiskers on this one for you, adding the inner ear and then there's pretty much a cat. Let's do another one. So this cat will have looking completely side on, so looking to the left. So again this time we'll only be able to see one eye so we'll have one circle. Here's our teardrop shape for the muzzle, here's the square and the little triangle for the nose and we're adding our mouth. There is the circle for the start of the ear and the circle around the eye. Here I am just refining that eye a little bit, again making it look pointed at the ends because that's how cat eyes are, they're not quite perfect circles, they're quite pointy at either end. I'm adding the dots for the whiskers, I'm adding my triangle, I want it pointing forwards a little bit this time. Okay and the other ear on the other side and then I want to add that back of the ear by adding that little bit extra so I'm giving that ear form, I'm giving it shape and there are three very very simple cat drawings to start you off. Usually when I'm drawing I'll go into more detail so I'll just give you a brief look at how I would draw the eye in a little bit more detail. So I'd start by drawing the circle and then making it the ellipse shape and then drawing the inner circle to form the iris. I just refine that shape a little bit more and then darken off the area around the iris or that ball of the eye and the bit that I've left blank is where the colour would be in real life. Cat eyes have an almost dash, most human eyes are perfect circles for their pupils whereas pupils of cats tend to be lines or ellipses shapes. I leave a little area of highlight and then I just very softly shade in the remaining iris. I then leave a little area underneath the eye or where the eyelid would be and just shade some darker regions to give the shape a little bit of form and structure just with some cross hatching simple shading. At this point there's not really any detail going in it's just a simple quick drawing that took about two minutes to do. Ok, now let's put it all into practice. So I'll start with the circle and I add in my lines and circles for the eyes. Here I'm just refining the eyes and adding that muzzle shape again. I'm taking a little bit more time with this one, being a bit more cautious with my marks and thinking about my head rather than actually drawing them out. So there you can see I've got the bridge of the nose and those eyelids and eyebrows. There's the triangular shape upside down love heart or right way up squash love heart for the nose. I'm just building some structures. You see how easy it is, it's already looking like a little bit of a cat. Now remember this isn't a finished drawing, this is just for the under drawing for a painting that I'm going to do. It's all going to get refined as I put the paint onto the canvas. So there you can see the ear and a little bit of the fur. Adding in the other ear, I'm thinking about proportions as I do it. I am using a reference photo to draw from, I'm not just drawing this from my head. I do recommend that if you are learning to draw cats, you are learning to draw using reference photos. You're studying your reference photos closely, trying to get your drawing to match as closely as possible. This piece is actually for a commission that I've been asked to do, it's a birthday present of one of my friends from university and yeah this is just the process that I go through when I'm designing the composition and doing the under drawings for the paintings that I do. So you can see I'm just refining the eye a little bit more, I'm adding some shading for where I want the darks to be, where I want those shadows to be, just to give it a little bit more shape, just so I can make a few more informed decisions when it comes to the actual painting process. I've just followed the same principle as before, started with the circle, the horizontal and vertical lines in the midpoints, the circles for the eyes, the upside down teardrops and the circles above the head for the ears, the little triangles, it's all of those basic principles for the structure of the cat's head. I'm just now using it into a little bit more of a refined drawing, but again not a massively refined drawing, just a simple sketch that I can use later on to help inform my actual work. I do these sketches quite a lot, usually in a little sketchbook, they're not very good sketches, they're never going to sell for any money, they aren't really for showing people other than for these little tutorials, but they do free up my hand, allow me to be a bit looser with my marks and I can plan things that I otherwise might have missed in the actual painting. Here I'm just using the side of the pencil just to shade in some more details, just shading those shadows, just refining this a little bit more, just so I can understand the shapes and forms, where I'm going to have my lights and my shadows later on when I do the actual painting. You can see it's not a brilliant drawing, I'm just shading in the background a little bit just to give a little bit of a difference between the cat and the background, but that's pretty much it really. What I sometimes do after this process is cover over the lines and the darker areas with a pen, and this is more so that you can see the video, you can see the darker areas a little bit better rather than for me. With my sketches I'd usually leave it with the pencil, but you can see I'm just using a biro, just using a sketch, just in the same process as I would with the pen, just cross hatching. I'm just showing that you can draw this with anything, you don't need a pencil to be able to draw, you could do everything with a pen, you just need to be a little bit more cautious when you're using the pen as obviously you can't erase it, you can't rub it out, so you need to think about what you're doing a little bit more. I actually do recommend that people that are starting to learn to draw, that you draw with a pen because you can't make those mistakes. If you make a mistake, that's it, your picture's ruined and you have to start again, or you have to find a way to incorporate those mistakes into your art, which is what makes a good artist good, because they are able to experiment and incorporate mistakes that they make, because yes, good artists do make mistakes too, they can incorporate those mistakes and use those mistakes to form part of their artwork. So there's the finished drawing, what I'm going to use this for is a reference for when I draw the actual piece onto the canvas that I'll be using to paint on, and you can see that in the next video, so this was part one of a two-part tutorial of how to draw and paint cats. I hope you found this video useful, the next video will be out on Monday and you can watch this video and my process of how I painted this cat. As always, thank you very much for watching and make sure to like and subscribe to the video, and head to studiowildlife.com for more wildlife art tips!