How To Draw Cat Eyes

19 Sep

0 463 Post by Melissa

Drawing Supplies For This Tutorial:

HB, 2B & 3B Pencils, Tortillon or Blending Stump, Kneaded Eraser, Clickable Eraser, Tissue, Acid-free Paper

Draw The Outline

1. Draw the Outline of the Cat Eyes using an HB pencil. Don’t press don’t too hard, as you will want to lighten these lines up before beginning to shade.

Shade the Eyes

2. Take a 2B pencil and shade in the eyes but leave out the highlights. The first layer should be a light grey value.

3. Next, shade in the pupil a medium-dark value as well as the corners of the eyes and around the outer edges of the eye as shown. Blend all areas with a tortillon.

4. Start shaping the eye colour by shading a medium grey value around the inside edges of the eye. Shading should be coming outwards from around the pupils into the eyes. You can now darken the pupil and outer edges as well as the corner of the eye. You may need to dab out the highlights in the eyes in case they were covered over from the blending.

A dirty tortillon was used to add value slightly around the fur area around the eyes.

Fur Direction

5. In working with the eyes a bit more, take out some light areas into the eyes by dabbing with a kneaded eraser.

6. Next, we can start on the fur by first shading a light to medium value in the direction the fur is growing – cover all areas. The shading is not to be smooth but with small strokes. Blend softly with a tortillon.

7. In this stage, we want to add darker fur strokes in shaping the cat’s fur by shading with a medium to dark value (depending on the degree of darkness in the fur) with staying with the direction of the fur. You will actually stroking in the fur at this time rather than shading. Fur is much shorter on the nose area than the rest of the head.

Highlights, Building Up Values & Final Details

8. In these final stages, you will be shaping the fur to bring up the values even further in the fur. Before taking out the lighter values of fur strokes, you want to darken the darker areas of the cat’s fur by stroking in fur with added pressure.

9. Next, take a clickable eraser or kneaded eraser to stroke out lighter values of fur, particularly around the eyes and in the stripes along the top of the cat’s head. You may need to go back and forth using the pencil and eraser to achieve effectiveness in creating realistic fur. Also, stroke out some highlighted fur on the rest of the head, but keep the strokes farther apart. In the final stage, you may need to touch up areas here and there.