How to Draw a Cat [Narrated Step-by-Step Tutorial]

Hey there everybody .

It's Mark Curley .

I'm back with another how to draw video .

This is number 12 in my ongoing series of videos showing how to draw various animals .

We've had how to draw a lion , how to draw tiger , leopard , fish , all kinds of different animals .

This time , I'm showing how to draw a cat now .

Uh a few years back , I did one on how to draw a kitten .

Uh The face was turned a little bit in the three quarter point of view .

This time , I'm gonna be looking straight ahead uh so that we can really focus on the balance of the facial features .

Well , uh people like to know what size I'm working at .

In fact , I would like to know what size I'm working .

What size am I working at ?

Well , with the magic of this drawing tool called a ruler , we can see that it is four inches from top to bottom uh that works out to 10 centimeters .

Uh And then I've just sort of divided it um right down the middle there .

So let's not waste any more time .

Let's go ahead and start drawing a basic guideline for the shape of the head .

OK .

So you can see I've put sort of a circular shape here , maybe a little wider than it is tall as you can see from top to bottom here .

Just a bit of a gap there .

Uh This line across the middle later on is gonna show us uh where to place the eyes .

Uh And you can see that I've left a gap here for the ears , which I think we should just go ahead and do right now .

Ok .

So you see the ears are , um , maybe a little more rounded , uh , than you might imagine .

And they don't necessarily come to a real point of the way .

We also , uh tend to picture uh , cats ears notice this sort of irregularity down here .

There's like a little bit of a wrinkle in the ear , at least in some of the uh cats in the photos that I studied , uh something that we don't normally notice until you look real carefully .

Um But , uh I'm gonna go ahead and add just a couple more lines here for further defining the ears .

So these two curved lines here , uh sort of define a , a part of the head , but it's really gonna be more fur that you're gonna see here .

In fact , quite a lot of fur in the ears .

Uh Later on also here , this is just gonna be an area of uh fur that comes up to the , uh really quite thin ridge of the ear that will become more um visible when we get into the shading part of it .

Let's go ahead now though and uh draw the ice .

So I covered quite a lot of ground here uh in this uh step .

But basically the thing you want to do is get these sort of oval shapes that to , to my mind look a little like they're tilted down a bit , the shape of the outside of each eye .

And in terms of placement and size , there's about one eye's uh uh space really two between them .

But to that center line that can help you get that where you need .

Of course , the cat eyes have this famously unusual shaped um pupil that can be um contracted or dilated .

And I would say it's a little bit uh in , in my drawing here , a little bit like a leaf shape almost .

Uh And then um I , I went ahead and started to indicate this black area .

I'm gonna be shading this in later on quite dark .

Uh But there , as with a lot of animals , there's very often a very dark black area just below the eyes .

I think it helps with uh keeping the sun out of their eyes or I don't know what else .

I'll just make up anything .

Yes , it tells you're keeping the sun out of their eye .

But I was gonna try to explain the shape here .

To me , it looks a little bit like , um , almost like side mirrors on a sports car or something .

Uh , but , uh , hopefully that'll help you later on .

We're gonna be , as I said , darkening all this in .

Well , let's go ahead now and draw , I think I'll draw both the basic shape of the nose and the mouth .

Ok .

So I tried to refocus the camera so you might get a little better view of this , the nose .

You know , we sort of think of it as a triangle and indeed it occupies a sort of triangular space down here , but it's rather more complicated than that because these nostrils here are sort of diagonally inserted into that shape on the side .

Um It almost starts to look like a mushroom , doesn't it uh sliced in half that kind of thing ?

And then I noticed this when I did the uh kitten as well that , you know , we , we maybe imagine a mouth shape that curves up like this on both sides .

But really , it's only the central part that is uh delineated .

And I decided to go in and get the uh chin in place .

A lot of this is gonna be , you know , greatly refined later on uh when it comes to drawing the fur .

And part of the reason why I'm zipping through so much right now is to uh kind of uh preserve time and allow plenty of time for showing how I draw the fur .

Uh But we're almost um able to get into that real time drawing .

I wanna do some of the patterns .

So I'm gonna go ahead and drop in some of the patterns here uh above the eyes and , and to the sides of the face .

So uh it has to be said that every cat is gonna have a different pattern .

So I don't know if you necessarily want to uh copy this uh line for line or stripe for stripe , I guess I would say .

But uh uh there do seem to be , you know , from one cat to another .

At least the ones that have this type type of patterning .

There does seem to be a tendency to have a line that starts near the eye , a stripe that sort of starts over here and trails off .

And then , um I noticed in a number of photos , these uh sort of surprisingly vertical lines in an area that , you know , human beings see as uh the sort of eyebrow area .

Uh And uh what I wanna do now is to um add in just one extra line here that's gonna help uh sort of rope off a space where there's a lot of white fur and then add a , a couple of rows of dots here that go right across the snout hood region or the uh I guess the area of the upper lip I would call it .

So , uh let's go ahead and get that in place .

And then I think we can kind of stop with all uh these lines and , and get on to uh doing the uh real time shading .

So , in this area where um the whiskers emanate from there are surprisingly regular uh horizontal rows of uh dots again , varying from one type of cat to another .

But uh at least in one of the photos , I studied really bold some of these dots here .

Uh but as I said , quite regular and there might even be uh a hint of um 1/4 horizontal row down here .

I'm just gonna sort of drop that in not quite as dark .

Um Again , on , on the photo that I looked at uh on one of these camps , uh it seemed to be the darkest areas seem to be up here and it seemed to get lighter and then I noticed that this one came , this row came right up until it almost reached the area of the nose .

I think I'm getting a little carried away with the precision here .

Uh This uh line here , as I said , is going to uh delineate a white area , an area of white fur that comes right outside of this uh this area here which I said uh earlier is gonna be quite black .

So there's this very bold area of high contrast right around the eyes .

Well , I think , uh maybe one last thing that I'm gonna do uh is to drop in some lines uh for the neck and then maybe just a little hint of where this fur begins to appear .

And then , uh , at last , we will be able to , uh , send old man time lapse on his way off to get a cup of coffee .

Gosh , man , you worked me hard today .

Uh And then we will get on to the real time , uh , part of the video .

Uh , so the lines of the neck here , I think , uh depending on the posture of the cat , maybe if it raises its head up high , this gets a little narrower .

Uh In any case , uh Here we see a , a jagged line that's gonna help me uh know where to put the this massive amount of white fur uh into each uh one of the ears .

But fern now let's go ahead and uh move on to doing some real time drawing in the area of the eyes .

All right .

So let's go ahead and get into the area of the eyes here .

Uh This part , this part around the whole edge of the eye is uh indeed gonna go very dark indeed , but I think I'll sort of hold off on that uh because it's mostly gonna be done with a black prisma color uh colored pencil .

Um But let's go ahead now and start working on uh doing some hopefully subtle shading here on the interior of the eyes .

Um This is um I guess the , the iris , the sort of colored area of the eye that would , that um fills in the , in the case of a cat seems to fill the entire space .

Whereas in human eyes you have outside of this Iris , you have the whites of the eyes .

Um And uh quite subtle the shading in here .

Uh in the photos , I looked at this um uh the pupil area is gonna go jet black , but I noticed uh just slightly darker shading near the edge of the um pupil .

And uh you could maybe go just a touch darker at the top of the whole uh iris then at the bottom .

Now , one of the nice things about a cat's uh uh face in terms of doing a drawing lesson like this is that it is very symmetrical and almost anything that I do gets repeated just uh in mirror image on the opposite side .

And so what I intend to do is to uh flip all , you know , do all , all those uh flip side , uh parts of the drawing in time lapse .

Uh So as to conserve time , uh I'm gonna go ahead then and do that and do everything that you saw me do here , I'm gonna do over there in time lapse .

So now we can start moving down into the area of the nose .

One thing about the shape that I put in here to be uh to begin with , uh that I didn't really get to is a little bit of a , a dividing line right here at the bottom that splits uh the nose into two halves .

Um Let's go ahead and just darken in this whole area again , I'll be pulling out a black colored pencil uh later on in the process to really , you know , beef up the contrast and make this super dark .

But for now , I just want you to be able to see what it is we're heading toward and then in terms of shading , um I'm gonna put down a sort of a base layer of uh gray here .

I guess it would be pink if you were doing this full color .

And uh again , I suppose different types of cats uh are gonna have different coloration uh down here , but I did notice in the photos that I studied a little bit more darkness down towards the bottom , uh then at the top .

So I'm sort of uh darkening things in just a bit and uh you know , you could maybe even erase away a little bit up here near the top .

So as to uh to convey that now what's gonna happen all across the top here ?

And I guess I'll just go ahead and get started with this is that there is um pretty intense coloring just above the nose .

Um And , you know , we , we're not quite ready to get into the part uh related to drawing fur , but it is sort of interesting that across the um top of the nose , the sort of bridge of the nose , there's this super short fur , it's just , um , you can't even discern the difference .

Uh , the hair is almost , it's also tightly packed .

Uh , and I'm not really sure why the , it evolved that way , I suppose .

Um , you , uh , you can get away with fur being long at the outside to the edge .

You wouldn't want it to be long here across the nose .

It would get in the ways of getting in the way of the eyes , I suppose .

But it is sort of interesting to notice the difference in length and I'm just , um , I can't do all of this real time , but I , I just want to sort of show you how , uh , there's this interesting gradient fade as it goes up and works its way up the nose , up the nose .

It , it went up my nose , dude .

Uh , no , uh , a across the bridge of the nose , it gets lighter and lighter as it goes up here .

And it's sort of , um , I guess I can , uh , you know , I'll , I'll be refining this later on , but you can begin to see what I'm talking about that .

There is sort of an interesting change in color , uh , and then , uh , across the edge , I suppose I might as well just continue with this .

Uh , it darkens up again over here on the edges of the nose .

Um , again , probably changing from one breed of cat to another .

Uh but uh even in cartoons , in cartoony drawings of cats , you'll often see two lines right here to sort of convey that shape of the , uh the cat's nose .

It is fairly important that we um suggest the structure here .

And well , anyway , I'm gonna , I'm gonna refine this much further , but I suppose I can uh right now , continue down uh to the mouth and the area of the mouth itself is relatively easy to draw .

Um There's a bit of shading that's gonna occur right here near the , the bottom sort of point of the nose and then just a little um almost a little diamond shape uh or , you know , circular shape of darkness here where you may see the , I suppose it's the lower lip or something .

But um it , it pretty immediately fades off into uh the fur of the um the chin .

I guess it would have to be down here .

And by the , this line that I've made uh very round and smooth is actually meant to be the uh contour of uh fur that uh by the time you get down here is starting to get a little longer .

So I'm , I'm kind of redrawing this uh to suggest that it's fur rather than some very smooth human like chin .

We don't want my cat to have a human like chin .

Um In any case , I think we can now move on to drawing the ears .

We'll get the ears and then hopefully we'll have plenty of time left over for drawing the fur .

All right .

So the first thing I'm gonna do here is to add just a little , um pointy tuft of darker fur right here at the tip .

Again , don't know if this is true of every single breed .

I don't want to speak for all cats .

You know , I think I speak for all cats when I say well , curly .

that was really bad .

But uh I , I do find myself having to repeatedly say uh yeah , this uh this may be true of some breeds and not of others .

Uh And indeed , this next part is no exception , but I did notice that this sort of wrinkle down here occurs and I'm gonna start shading in to , to sort of convey what I'm talking about that .

Uh at least with some cat breeds , you don't get this perfect um perfectly smooth triangular shape that the , the uh flesh of the ear sort of um bends in sort of wrinkles in for whatever reason , uh on some of these cats and you end up with uh this shaded area gets a little shady uh down here .

And the , if you're , you know , if you can study the photo really uh carefully , you'll actually begin to get a sense of the , of the ear uh wrinkling in here and creating this uh secondary area .

I'm gonna go ahead and just continue adding the , the pencil gray all the way through what uh you know , sort of amounts to the interior of the ear .

And uh most of that , uh most of this uh sort of inside the back wall of the ear , I guess is my best way of describing it , uh ends up being obscured by uh fur that is coming across .

Now , uh when it comes to drawing fur , my big thing is to pay attention to the uh direction and not just have a bunch of messy random looking lines .

Uh the fur , this massive amount of fur that uh grows seemingly out of the uh inside corner of the ear here is going sort of uh largely horizontal with uh gentle curves to it .

It is quite white .

And so even as I draw it , now , I may be erasing a way to get back to the white of the page .

Um Sometimes , you know , when you're trying to draw something that's white , you are just leaving the um letting the page itself be the white and you end up drawing the sort of spaces behind .

So like right here , I'm kind of trying to draw the dark and in the back part of the ear .

So as to make this fur look increasingly white , as I said , I will um maybe be erasing away and I'm probably even gonna pull out my beloved whitewash uh to do some final touches later .

Um I keep thinking about the whiskers .

The whiskers are also white and that becomes a challenge for an artist um to , you know , to draw white lines basically is what you're being asked to do .

But maybe it's just because of the uh the lighting or whatever .

But the uh this area , there's not so much light reaching the fur over here .

And so this part back here also is getting gonna get shaded in a little bit .

Well , happily , this is one of these areas where I can , um , uh , tell you that the other years is the same thing , just flipped around , uh , a mirror image before I get to that though .

I suppose I'll just point out quickly the direction that these little hairs are growing in up here , kind of quite uh vertical right here in this area .

Whereas this line that I'd put in initially again to describe fur kind of radiating out from the inside , uh , uh from the center of the , the face and that becomes kind of true of the fur in general .

I like that phrase radiating out .

It is sort of all , uh pointing out like the face of a clock or something on the fur tends to grow , uh , roughly speaking in that direction .

Well , let's go ahead now and , uh , I'm gonna do in time lapse , do the other ear , uh , basically exactly the same way .

So you see the area of the ears , uh , surprisingly complex .

Actually , if you're trying to do a faithful , uh , you know , realistic drawing of a cat , but it's not necessary to get so concerned with these details .

I think if you get the basics of it , you know , are people really looking at the ears when they look at the your cat drawing , I don't think so .

They're gonna be mainly looking at the eyes and uh the nose and so forth .

So anyway , I think it's time to start moving on to drawing the uh fur .

And uh as I said , uh I'm gonna uh I tried to reserve some space here at the end of this video .

So as to do some of the fur uh real time , uh drawing fur is notoriously time consuming .

So I can't promise that you're gonna see everything done in real time .

But I'm starting with these uh stripes here and going ahead and darkening those in , as I said , there is a tendency for the fur to kind of radiate out from the inside uh of the um you know , like from a center point on the face .

And so this fur here , which is fairly short , uh at least uh uh uh on the type of the breed of cat that I was looking at as I study different photos , um you can see the individual hairs .

Uh And uh so it is wise to make some note of the direction that they're pointing uh in uh and begin to replicate that in your drawing .

Uh So I'm getting all that into place here .

Uh a little bit of whiteness I found uh in this area near the ear , which hopefully uh also conveys the , you know , gives us some contrast there and uh helps to e you know , hopes to convey the shape of the ears .

I think over here where I have a , a very simple circular shape that's gonna have to go and be replaced by a more jagged edge that is um you know , filled with indications of the fur .

By the time you get over here , I believe it is mostly uh horizontal , directionally speaking , I believe there is a horizontal to the cat's fur , you know , and I went back and listened to the kitten the video that I did on how to draw a kitten and it's filled with terrible uh English accents .

So if you want to hear me do more horrible English accents , go ahead and check out my how to draw a kitten .

A video , I will link to the uh the whole the entire playlist of all these uh various animals uh in the uh info box of this video , the description and um up here between these two stripes , uh it seems to me fairly consistent among striped uh cats in the striped cat community .

They seem to favor a number of smaller stripes here in between uh straight up the middle .

And I'll be honest , I'm just sort of um you know , this is not based on examining some sort of pattern uh from a photo and trying to carefully replicate it .

This is me just sort of dropping in stripes .

Willy nilly Willy rely without , with wild abandoned .

Um , but , you know , probably there are people out there watching this video who know more about cats than I do .

Probably it's guaranteed .

Uh And they could tell me if there is consistency in this patterning .

Um I'm particularly curious about this idea of there being maybe one major one here , another uh smaller one off to the side .

And then this sort of patterning that I've been talking about right up the middle .

I wonder if that is uh fairly consistent from one cat uh to another or indeed , do you see them going horizontally across ?

I have a feeling you don't , I'm just gonna throw it in my , my ignorance .

I have a feeling using my intuition .

I , I'm guessing that it's kind of like that .

In any case , this shows you the basic um direction as we get down here to the eyes again , it seems to me that there uh it's lightening up and getting wider as we get closer uh to , to that initial shape of the eye .

So you could almost kind of just in a shorthand way .

I'm gonna try to get some gray in here that is not um really showing the direction of the fur .

It's just uh uh hope hopefully helping you to see how wide it gets in this area just outside , it's like it goes completely black just outside the eye and then it goes white again , um , just outside of that black area and then you get into the more , uh , mixed , uh , fur area , I guess now's as good a time as any for me to go in and , uh , start continuing this , uh , darkness up the bridge of the nose and , you know , as usual , I can sort of sense the , the , the length of this video stretching out , going minute by minute into a longer and longer video .

And I fear some people just won't even click on a video that , uh , is 30 40 50 minutes long .

So I do have to sort of reign it in , in terms of , uh , showing everything , uh , from here on out real time .

But how about if I shift , focus on the camera , uh , shift down to the lower part of the face so that I can , uh , uh , start to point out some of the shading down there and then it may be time to just sort of kick it in the time lapse and move towards completion .

But let's go ahead and draw , uh , the lower part of the cat's face .

Ok .

So I wanted to quickly show how , uh this area down here , you know , we had a circle down there to begin with that probably needs to , um , be adjusted , uh , to suggest a slightly more triangular shape to to the jaw as it comes down here to the chin .

And I am not trying to indicate fur here right now , I'm just going in and getting um some gray .

So as to help you see the the shape of this white area , oh pencil falling to the floor recorded on youtube for all eternity .

Um But uh coming up here , this uh this whole uh basic shape down here is defined by whiteness .

Hopefully , that is true of a wide variety uh of cat breeds and not just the um photos that I studied up here as we move .

Um north from the mouth .

Can we use directions north west from the mouth point ?

Um We are gonna get some shading in here and if you want to really go for the details , I do believe you can see individual uh hairs again , sort of radiating out from the um center of the face , but very short .

I believe the fur in this part of the face , very , very short , very trim .

You know , when they , when cats go to the barber , they say please just really keep it real short there across the front of my face .

I just , I can't stand it .

Have it get real shaggy there .

Uh So uh across this area I had put in um you know , a , a somewhat random shape .

I don't know if it's , you know , based on a photo that I looked at , I don't know if there's any consistency from one breed to another .

But , um , uh , at least one type of cat , uh , there's darkness , uh , sort of , I'm making it kind of a gray .

Uh , but right along here , as I said , quite a lot of white just beneath the I , and let's see , oh , we're gonna get down to this area where , uh , you're gonna see the , uh whiskers and I thought maybe that could be one of the last things , I'm just gonna sort of dash in a fair amount of gray here .

So as uh to show you how you might be able to , um , draw whiskers in here with uh an eraser .

So I'm kind of cheating a little bit here .

I'm gonna refine this shading quite a bit later on , but I wanted to get in sort of a base of gray here so that , uh I can switch to a brand new pencil right out of the box that has the nice , um , you know , untouched eraser that will allow me to go in here and start going across , excuse me .

Uh And hopefully you can begin to see how this might allow you to uh do indications of whiskers .

You do want to pay attention to the direction the whiskers tend to go sort of start horizontal near the top and then begin with gentle curves to begin pointing down , I guess a little diagonally , you might say , uh , there also are whiskers , I don't know if they're called whiskers , but white hairs of a sort right up here in uh what we , we would think of as the eyebrow region , the Avian region as we call it .

Um , not nearly as many as down near the nose , I would say maybe three or four at most .

But what I'm gonna do later on is use white , gosh , to make this uh whiter still , I thought I'd give you the option for those of you who don't want to mess around with white wash , which is an opaque white paint .

Uh You can maybe get away with just using an eraser uh for conveying a little bit of the uh whiskers .

Well , I am sad to say that I think we have reached maybe the end of the real time uh drawing .

I hope you got enough of um my uh pointers on drawing the fur .

I know that can be , you know , contentious issue for some of my viewers .

They're like , I got everything was fine until you started racing through the fur .

Well , um it really is a , a time consuming thing to do the kind of drawing that I'm gonna do here this morning .

Uh for me it's morning for you .

It may well be middle of the night .

Um But uh to do this kind of a drawing , this level of detail , it's gonna take me like three hours altogether , I would think and I am not going to upload a three hour video folks not that day anyway , so I'm gonna go ahead and uh refocus so as to um uh cover all the rest of the fur and so forth .

Uh and even bring in my black uh prisma color , my trusty black Prisma color , which is really just a fairly ordinary black colored pencil to darken things in .

I'm gonna do all of that stuff and maybe just come back to do a little bit of the application uh real time uh before we wind down the video .

All right .

Well , as you can see , I put a lot of time into uh rendering the fur and probably two hours uh all together um to achieve this effect .

And uh yeah , sadly , you can't just show all two hours real time like that .

But , you know , maybe in the future I can come up with uh finally , the video that focuses on fur and creating the effect uh of fur .

But for now , what I wanna do is add a little bit of white gosh , which is an opaque uh white paint .

You have to dilute it with water a little bit .

Um And then uh that allows you to add some highlights like I'm gonna do right now to the eyes .

Um Now , of course , you could just um try to avoid putting pencil there or erase it away , but with the white gosh , you can get real uh sharp um edges to the white .

That's pretty hard to do .

Uh when you're erasing uh away to the white of the page .

Uh and I didn't mean to say that , oh , you need to go out and buy some white .

Gosh , I just wanted to show people uh the effects that were possible .

Uh If you did decide to invest , it doesn't cost that much invest , I'm going to invest in white gush .

It , it's only like $2 or something uh to get a tube of white wash .

Uh , but as I said , don't forget to , uh , dilute it a little bit with water .

Well , I'm gonna go ahead and finally one last little bout of time lapse here to use , uh , this white wash to , uh , get just that last bit of contrast in here , maybe on the , uh , some of the whiskers and so forth and then I'll be back with a few final words .

All right .

Well , there's my video on how to draw a cat .

Please let me know what you thought and my apologies for having taken so long , uh , since the last animal related video , that's why I put a little extra time into this one .

I wanted to make it something special , sort of make up for the last time , but hopefully I'll have another animal how to draw a video a lot sooner .

Uh , but until then I want to thank anyone who has supported me by getting any of my books like Brodie's Ghost and Meek Falls , both of these graphic novels and the realism challenge .

Probably the closest thing to uh what you saw in this video today teaching you hyper realistic drawing , illustrating techniques and of course mastering manga and mastering manga to always super appreciative of anyone who helps me out by getting any of those books .

But let me go ahead and lay down this pencil .

I wanna thank you all for watching this video .

I hope you found it helpful and I'll be back with another one real soon .