How to Draw a Cartoon Cat

Danny Green: Hi, I am Danny Green and I am a teacher and the illustrator here at the Gilded Page in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are in the classroom here today and we're going to teach you how to draw a cartoon cat. Okay, we start off adding the ears here, start to move to the eyes, we'll add the basic shape for the head here, just kind of a football shape for cats, I think. Draw few whiskers there. Cats have a longish kind of neck. Draw collar here, draw the chest area here kind of puffy, I am drawing him standing up, draw the legs on him here. Taper it a little more, and so gets a paw. A little tufts of fur at the bottom of the belly just to give sense of furriness and draw his hindquarters there, sort of a big round shape in the rump.

I'll give him a nice little tail here with a little curve there. Cats have a nice long elegant line for the back and the quarters here. Okay, now we've completed our pencil outline and now we'll go to adding an ink outline. I use a brush pen filled with the waterproof ink and we'll just add in some fur there around here, right in the ears here. Draw his big paws, legs here, fur there, just little tufts of fur at the bottom of the belly just to give sense of furriness and cats have a nice long elegant line for the back and the quarters here.

Draw the hind part in the back there and again big paws for the back feet, for the tail here and draw couple of little lines at the end kind of suggest a hairy tail. We'll do the eyes, ovals for the eyes. Okay, now we are done with adding ink to the drawing now and we'll go now and we'll start adding color, we'll take up pastels. We'll add some yellow on the face here, body of him here. Cats are kind of more yellowish, not pure yellow, add some here. Now, we're going to add some brown as well.

Just add a little bit here on the other side and again, just try to fill in shadows. We'll smear it around later. And that's it, that's we have got our all preliminary colors. Now, we'll go to our paper stump here and start smearing around and start adding shape to it. We'll work in the highlight-- work in the shadow areas here to darken there and we've added color to the dark side of the cat, the dark shadow areas of the cat. So now we're just smearing up around and adding a little form to it, gives a little shape and dimension.

Okay, there we go, we've finished our cartoon cat. Now, we're going to move on to a much bigger animal; we are going to draw a cartoon horse next.