How to Draw Cats

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura Pace. I'm here at Asel Art Supply. Today, I'm going to give you a little lesson on how to draw cats. The first thing I did was I look at some anatomy books on comparative animal anatomy and I found a good drawing of a cat skeleton. So I wanted to make a more simplified drawing of that skeleton and what I did is I draw in the cat's skull and I draw in some lines with dots where the joints of different bones are, to give me an idea of how the cat moves and what's its skeleton looks like. You can see it's got a long graceful bones and a very slight build. Most cats even if they look big and fat or mostly fur, when you get a cat down to its muscle and skeleton, it's a very long, slim, lean creature and a very graceful creature. Another thing to notice about a cat is its spine is extremely flexible which probably helps it get into all kinds of tiny spaces. But if you have a cat, you might notice when it's washing itself that it can curl its spine into nearly a complete circle. Another interesting thing about cats is their paws look rounded when they're walking around and when they're calm because they walk with their claws retracted back into their paws. They don't put their claws out like dogs or bears or other carnivorous do. I got some pictures of my own cat and I use them to help me draw cat faces. Something I notice about cat heads is they're very round, they're made up of a lot of circles. So I draw this cat from head on and I made kind of a couple of intersections, intersecting round shapes there. The eyes are also very round and the eyes on my cat have a very dark black outline that give them a lot of shape and definition. You'll see, looking at a cat's skull that a cat's eyes and ears are very, very large features, probably giving it a lot of advantages when its out looking for little creatures to capture. I made two big triangles here that kind of stick out three quarters of the way around this round shape. And another interesting thing I noticed when I was drawing this cat from head on is the outside lines of the ears intersect right down here at the base of the nose; giving that, it's kind of a triangular shape in here. This is a three quarter inch view of a cat that I did from my photograph and I added some more details to this cat to give it more realism after I draw in the basic round shape of the muscle, the head and the ears. I went back in and put a little suggestion of fur inside the ears, although most of the ears are kind of hairless with really, really short hair. And the hair on the face of the cat is mostly pretty short and close to the skin. But on the neck of the cat, there's a rough of long soft fur. Another thing I added for more realism are the whiskers. Cats have whiskers both on the front of their face and their muscle and around their eyes above their eyes. They say cats use them to judge distance if they're trying to get into a small space. They use their whiskers to measure that space to make sure that the rest of their body can fit through there. Another interesting thing to notice about cats is how their eyes change depending on the light conditions. If you saw this cat in a very dark room, its pupils would be all the way open and very round-looking. They'd fill almost the whole eye space. But I was going from a flash photograph here which had very bright light, so the eyes, pupils are very slit-like and very small. In bright light, a cat's pupils are going to look like vertical slits. So that's what I have to teach you today about drawing cats. Practice them on your own."