How to Draw a Siamese Cat Portrait in Colored Conte Crayons

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Jay French from jayfrenchstudios.com and today I'm going to teach you how to do a Siamese cat portrait in Conte crayon. I'm going to start out with our darkest and get the most prominent features of the cat. A good way to start is get the nose and build the shape of the head around that. So, we're going to get and, of course, you probably want to use a photo source, so we're going to get the darkness of the nose in there. Try to get, and you can pencil this in first if you like, I usually would. Get the general position of the eyes and one of the tricks, of course, with drawing animals is to remember that their eyes aren't nearly as close together as human eyes are. Now the markings on the Siamese are distinctively on the face, is the darkest areas. So you would get a very definite, there's almost a, kind of a skull-like shape to the markings on the Siamese cat. And then you'll get the outer edge of the head and this will look a lot less creepy once we get this filled in some more, look a little less skull-like. But I have noticed that from drawing them before. Okay. Another thing I remember about a lot of the animals, this is true for canines and felines, their ears are a lot closer together than you probably realize. So now, again, I have not sketched this underneath, so I don't expect this to be perfect. I just want this to, just want this to teach you how to do it. Okay. So shade, I might want to use something lighter, a little less soft, to fill in these areas. There's usually a bit of a lightness area underneath. I want to go back here for a second and get the irises so this cat doesn't look quite so demonic. Always leave a highlight in your pupils so that you have life in your image whenever drawing an animal or a person. Highlight to the pupil is the whole secret to drawing the difference between a dead-looking eye and a living- looking face. Siamese cats generally are, they're often called seal point or other types of point, I can't remember. But, basically, is because the darkest areas of their markings are at the tip of the nose. This actually, will actually get, this will actually get some more darkness here because it's actually a shape. This is the prominent, the muzzle. So not only is it the outer edge and the darkest area of the markings, but it's also getting shadow from depth. Leave some light or you can go in with your white crayon and make sure you define where the mouth is. Because you can see very little on a cat's face and you can see very little of its mouth. You want to make sure to show that so you can tell. And usually a bit of darkness to the outer edge in Siamese markings. They always have dark around their ears, tips. If you're doing an angle or back view of a Siamese the entire backs of the ears are dark with, have the dark markings. And there you have your basic portrait of a Siamese cat in Conte crayon."