I rarely draw cats.
Most don’t seem to like me staring at them. (Dogs never seem to mind.)
And the heads are so different from canine heads. Let’s face it. If you can draw a dog you can, with adjustment, draw all bears, raccoons, fishers, martins, foxes, wolves, hyenas, and hundreds of species I’m just not thinking of at the moment.
But cats are cats.
I’ll get the hang of it one day.
The nice thing about sketching with watercolor and using it opaquely is that you can go over stuff pretty easily. I never got the shadows right on the head so one eye looks too small, when it’s really an angle “thing.”
And of course the proportions. Yeah I’m still trying to work on that with the “new eyes.”
And let’s just call it a twelve toed cat OK? My vet used to have one so I know that’s a thing.
I had not intended to cover the whole background, all that tan paper! But I didn’t like the shadow I’d put in so I covered it up with some cobalt violet and a little bit of white gouache.
I made a video of the sketch and will play it on my Patreon site. I’m working to get that set up—more news to follow (it’s going to happen soon). In the video you’ll be able to see me make decisions, sometimes not wise ones—about going with things as is because I have fallen in love with a passage of paint. The thing is I don’t feel pained about it—I can always make another painting, paying more attention to a whole new list of things I’ve noticed.
A friend told me, that ignoring one another is the polite thing in the cat universe. So us staring at them is highly impolite, shows how under-educated we humans are and a lot of cats simply do not tolerate it and go away. I have no clue if the explations are correct but it certainly suits my experience.
I’ve heard similar things from my cat-owning friends, I’m sure there is something in this.