How to Draw a Cat

It should be fairly easy to get the chance to draw a cat, as cats sleep around 16-18 hours a day, so even if you are not a fast sketcher there should be plenty of time :-)

But of course it is not as easy as that.

First of all you might not have a cat, secondly you might not want to make a drawing of a sleeping cat. So what do you do?

Unless you are trained or a natural talent it helps a lot with some guidelines about how to draw a cat.
You can use those guidelines to get an overall feeling of the shape of a cat, or you can use them to draw the cat sketch you want to draw.

I do that a lot. Use guidelines, or use a picture of a cat to get the right proportions. After making a lot of drawings, your fingers somehow know how to draw what you see, or what you have in your imagination.

Black and white cat sketches:

First I will show you an easy way of drawing the head of a cat:

You start drawing a circle, or perhaps rather an oval, make a vertical line to divide the two sides, a horizontal line a little below the middle and two short lines to mark the bottom of the nose and the mouth.

Now you add the ears.
The middle of the eyes are on the horizontal line, and approx. in the middle of each side.
The bottom of the nose goes to the upper one of the small lines, the mouth the lower one.

          

Next step is to model the outer lines of the head. As you might notice I have flattened the upper part of the head, and made curves where the cat's jaw goes inward.

Also I ended op lowering the line for the mouth a bit, got it a little wrong the first time.

You will always find something to change, because when you make the drawing somehow the character of the cat shows, and you should make the changes to help the character come through.

 

Finally you erase the help-lines, and finishes drawing of the cat's head with fur and whiskers.

As you can see, this ended up being a cute cat, a kind of friendly cat.

 

 

 

I made one more sketch of a cat's head just to show you how different they can become.

This one is made with the head more frontal, the outline is a circle and the eyes are just above the middle horizontal line.

  

       

    

Next step is to make a drawing of a cat standing.

Start with an oval, or an egg-shape, slightly at an angle.
Make a curve for the back, add lines for the head, legs and tail

Draw the eyes, the nose and mouth, shape the head.
You can see that I shortened the head a little, and made the shape more regular.

Continue making the head of the cat as you would like it.

Use the pencil to "color" the cat, and finally erase what is left of the help-lines.
I also moved the one foreleg, to get a better balance.

And then you have a drawing of a cat!

How to draw a kitten in Manga style:

I also want to show you how to draw a kitten Manga style:

       

            

From here you can color the kitten drawing with shadows.

 

And one more kitten. The first drawing could look like the start of drawing a duck, but it isn't :-)