Adding Depth to Cartoon Cat Drawings

Video Transcript

"Another way to do shadowing on your drawing, is by using a very fine tipped felt pen, so this example now, we've drawn in our playful cat with some very basic colors, and I want to add in some shadowing, so basically with very, very fine lines, you can see these are really small, very small. I trace along the back here, and you're going to notice very quickly, that the drawing starts to take on some more depth, some more weight, three dimensional attributes, as opposed to just having the good, but still ultimately, quickly scriggled on lines we started with. Cartoons, like other forms of drawings, are still works of art that you build up. There are different layers to them. There's the basic under drawing. Then there's adding on color, shape, shadow, so in this case, let's have the shadow go all around the body, so bring it up over here on the paws. Now notice how, I don't tend to bring the shadow all the way around everything. I usually find it's good to kind of pick a side, unless an object is supposed to be in total darkness, so kind of pick a side that you want the shadow to go along, like I'm doing here. You can even shadow a little bit of the whisker area, to give your cat a little bit more of a smile there. You can catch a little bit of a line. Now, you can also add shadowing to the ball of yarn. You may want to make this a little more pronounced than your cat because it's going to be harder to see, so underneath here, I'm going to have some shadowing going on underneath the ball on the underside, but I'm not going to extend it all the way to the top, so experiment however you like with the shadowing. The basic thing to remember is a fine felt-tipped pen can be excellent for adding shadow and depth to your cat cartoons or any cartoons for that matter."