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

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i am back with a
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all in my ongoing see
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various animals we've had how to draw a lion audra tiger leopard fish all kinds
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of different animals this time i'm showing how to draw a cat now a few
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years back i did one on how to draw kitten
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the face was turned a little bit in the three quarter point of view this time
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I'm going to be looking straight ahead so that we can really focus on the
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balance of the facial features well people like to know what size i'm
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working at two in fact i would like to know what size i'm working what size my
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working well with the magic of this drawing tool called a ruler
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we can see that it is four inches from top to bottom
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that works out to 10 centimeters and then I just sort of divided it right
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down the middle there so what's my wasting more time let's go ahead and
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start drawing a basic guideline for the shape of the head
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ok so you can see I've put sort of a circular shape here maybe a little wider
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than it is tall as you can see from top to bottom here just a bit of a gap there
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this line across the middle later on is going to show us where to place the eyes
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and you can see that I've left a gap here for the ears which I think we
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should just go ahead and do right now
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ok so you see the ears are making a little more rounded than you might
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imagine and they don't necessarily come to a real point of the way we also tend
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to picture a cat's ears notice the sort of irregularity down here this like a
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little bit of a wrinkle in the ear at least in some of the cats and the photos
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that I studied something that we don't normally notice until you look real
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carefully but i'm going to go ahead and add just a couple more lines here for
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further defining the ears
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so these two curved lines here and sort of define a part of the head but it's
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really going to be more fur that you're going to see here in fact quite a lot of
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fur in the years later on also hear this is just going to be an area of fur that
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comes up to the really quite thin ridge of the ear
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they will become more visible when we get into the shading part of it let's go
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ahead now though and draw the ice
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so I covered quite a lot of
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here in this step but basically the thing you want to do is get these sort
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of oval shapes to tend to my mind look a little like they're tilted down a bit
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the shape of the outside of each I and in terms of placement and size there's
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about one
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I the space really - between them but to that center line that can help you get
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that where you need of course the cat eyes have this famously unusually shaped
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pupil that can be contracted or dilated and i would say it's a little bit in my
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drawing here a little bit like a leaf shape almost and then I i want to have
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been started to indicate this about black area i'm going to be shading this
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in later on quite dark but there
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as with a lot of animals there's a very often a very dark black area just below
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the eyes i think that the helps with keeping the Sun out of their eyes or I
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don't know what I'll just make up anything
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yes it helps you keeping this out of the right but I was going to try to explain
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this shape here to me it looks a little bit like almost like side mirrors on a
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sports car or something but hopefully that will help you later on we're going
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to be as I said darkening all this and well let's go ahead now and draw i think
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i'll draw both the basic shape of the nose and the mouth
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ok so i tried to refocus the camera so you might get a little a better view of
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this the nose
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you know we sort of think of it as a triangle and indeed it occupies the sort
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of triangular ish space down here but it's rather more complicated than that
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because these nostrils here sort of diagonally inserted into that shape on
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the side
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it almost starts to look like a mushroom doesn't sliced in half that kind of
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thing and then I noticed this when i did the kitten as well that you know we we
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may be imagined a mouth shape that curves up like this on both sides but
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really it's only the central part that is delineated and I decided to go in and
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get the chin in place a lot of this is going to be you know greatly refined
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later on when it comes to drawing the fur and part of the reason why I'm
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zipping through so much right now is to kind of preserved time and allow plenty
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of time for showing how i draw the fur but we're almost able to get into that
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real time drawing i want to do some of the patterns so i'm going to go ahead
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and drop in some of the patterns here above the eyes and into the sides of the
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face
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so I it has to be said that every cat is going to have a different pattern so I
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don't know if you necessarily want to copy this line for line or stripe for
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stripe i guess i would say but there do seem to be you know from one account to
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another at least the ones that have this type of patterning there does seem to be
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a tendency to have a line that starts near the I a stripe the sort of starts
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over here and trails off and then I noticed in a number of photos these sort
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of surprisingly vertical lines in an area that you know human being see as
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the sort of eyebrow area and what I want to do now is to add in just one extra
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line here that's going to help sort of rope off a space where there is a lot of
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white for and then add a couple of rows of dots here that go right across the
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snow to the region where the I guess the area of the upper lip i would call it so
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let's go ahead and get that in place and I think we can kind of stop with all of
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these lines and and get on to doing the real-time shading
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so in this area where the whiskers emanate from there are the surprisingly
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regular horizontal rows of dots again varying from one type of kin to another
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but at least in one of the photos i studied really bold some of these dots
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here but as I said quite regular and there might even be a hint of a fourth
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horizontal row down here on the disk master
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drop that and they not quite as dark again on the photo that i looked at on
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one of these cats
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it seemed to be the darkest areas seem to be up here and it seemed to get
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lighter and then I noticed that this one came this rope him right up until it
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almost reached the area of the nose I think I'm getting a little carried away
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with the precision here this line here as i said is going to delineate a white
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area an area of white for that comes right outside of this this area here
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which I said earlier is going to be quite black so there's this very bold
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the area of high contrast right around the eyes
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well I think maybe one last thing that I'm going to do is to drop in some lines
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for the neck and then maybe just a little hint of where this fur begins to
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appear and then at last we will be able to send old man time lapse on his way
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off to get a cup of coffee
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- man you were working me hard today and then we will get onto the real-time part
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of the
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so the lines of the neck here I think depending on the posture of the cat
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maybe if it raises his head up high this gets a little narrower in any case of
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here we see a jagged line that's going to help me know where to put the this
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massive amount of white fur into each one of the ears but for now let's go
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ahead and move on to doing some real time drawing in the area of the eyes
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alright so let's go ahead and get into the area of the eyes here this part of
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this part around the whole edge the eye is indeed going to go very dark indeed
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but I think I'll sort of hold off on that because it's mostly going to be
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done with a black prismacolor colored pencil but let's go ahead now and start
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working on doing some hopefully subtle shading here on the interior of the eyes
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this is I guess them the iris the sort of colored area of the eye that would
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that fills in the in the case of a cat seems to fill the entire space whereas
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in human eyes you have
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outside of this Irish you have the whites of the eyes and quite subtle the
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shading in here in the photos i looked at this
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the pupil area is going to go jet black
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but i noticed just slightly darker shading near the edge of the people and
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you could maybe go just a touch darker at the top of the whole iris them
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at the bottom
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not one of the nice things about a cat's face in terms of doing a drawing lesson
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like this is that it is very symmetrical and almost anything that I do gets
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repeated just in mirror image on the opposite side and so what I intend to do
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is to flip all you know do all the all those flip side parts of the drawing in
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time lapse and so is to conserve time i'm going to go ahead then and do that
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and everything that you saw me do here i'm going to do over there in time lives
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so now we can start moving down into the area of the nose one thing about the
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shape that I put in here to be to begin with that I didn't really get to is it a
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little bit of a dividing line right here at the bottom that splits the nose into
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two halves
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let's go ahead and just darken and this whole area again i'll be pulling out a
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black colored pencil later on in the process to really you know beef up the
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contrast to make this super dark but for now I just want you to be able to see
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what it is we're heading toward and then in terms of shading i'm going to put
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down a sort of a base layer of grey here i guess would be pink
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if you were doing this full color and again I suppose different types of cats
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are going to have different coloration down here but I did notice in the photos
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that I studied a little bit more darkness down towards the bottom then at
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the top some sort of fun
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darkening things and just a bit and you know you could maybe even erase away a
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little bit up here near the top sister to convey that now what's going to
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happen all across the top here i guess i'll just go ahead and get started with
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this is that there is a pretty intense colouring just above the nose and you
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know we were not quite ready to get into the part related to drawing fur but it
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is sort of interesting that it across the top of the nose the sort of bridge
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of the nose
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there's this super short for it's just um
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you can't even discern the difference the the hair is almost it's all so
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tightly packed and I'm not really sure why the it evolved that way I suppose
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you
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you can get away with fur being long at the outside to the edge you wouldn't
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want to be long here across the nose would get in the ways of getting away
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the eyes i suppose but it is sort of interesting to notice the difference in
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length and I'm just I can't do all of this real time I just want to sort of
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show you how there's this interesting gradient fade as it goes up and works
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its way up the nose of the nose but it went up my nose dude
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no I grow across the bridge of the nose it gets lighter and lighter as it goes
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up here and it's sort of um I guess I can you know i'll be refining this later
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on but you can begin to see what I'm talking about that there is sort of an
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interesting change in color and then across the edge i suppose I might as
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well just continue with this
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it darkens up again over here on the edges of the nose again probably
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changing from one breed of cat to another but even in cartoons in cartoony
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drawings of cats you'll often see the two lines right here to sort of convey
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that shape of the the can't knows it is fairly important that we suggest the
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structure here and well anyway - I'm going to refine this much further but i
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suppose i can right now continue down to the mouth and the area of the mouth
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itself is relatively easy to draw
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there's a bit of shading that's going to occur right here near the bottom
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sort of . of the nose and then just a little almost little diamond shape or
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you know circular shape of darkness here where you may see the I suppose it's the
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lower lip or something but it pretty immediately fades off into the fur of
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the
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the chin I guess it would have to be down here and bother this line that I've
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made a very round and smooth is actually meant to be the contour of fur that by
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the time you get down here is starting to get a little longer so i'm i'm kind
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of redrawing this to suggest that it's for rather than some very smooth
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human-like gym
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we didn't want my cat to have a human-like seen in any case I think we
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can now move on to drawing the ears will get the ears and then hopefully we'll
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have plenty of time left over for drawing the fur
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alright so the first thing I'm going to do here is to add just a little pointy
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tuft of darker for right here at the tip again don't know if this is true of
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every single breed
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I don't want to speak for all cats
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you know I think I speak for all cats when I say well drilling that was really
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bad but I I do find myself having to repeatedly say you have a said this may
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be true of some breeds and not of others and indeed this next part is no
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exception but I did notice that the sort of wrinkle down here occurs and i'm
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going to start shading into to sort of convey what I'm talking about that at
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least with some cat breeds you don't get this perfect perfectly smooth triangular
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shape that the the flesh of the ear sort of bends in sort of wrinkles em for
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whatever reason I'm some of these cats and you end up with this shaded area
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gets a little shady down here and the if you're you know if you can study the
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photo really carefully you'll actually begin to get a sense of the
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you're wrinkling in here in creating this secondary area i'm going to go
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ahead and just continue adding the the pencil gray all the way through
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what you know sort of amounts to the interior of the ear and most of that
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most of this sort of inside the back wall of the ear angus is my best way of
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describing it ends up being obscured by fur that is coming across now when it
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comes to drawing fer my big thing is to pay attention to the direction and not
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just have a bunch of messy random looking lines
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yeah the furthest massive amount of further the grows seemingly out of the
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inside corner of the year here is going sort of largely horizontal with the
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gentle curves to it
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it is quite white and so even as I draw it now i may be erasing a way to get
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back to the White of the page
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sometimes you know when you're trying to draw something that's white you are just
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leaving the letting the page itself be the white and you end up drawing the
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sort of spaces behind so like right here I'm kind of trying to draw the Darkin in
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the back part of the year
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so as to make this for look increasingly white as i said i will maybe be racing
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away and i'm probably going to pull out my beloved whitewash to do some final
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touches later on
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I keep thinking about the whiskers the whiskers are also white and that becomes
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a challenge for an artist to you know to draw white lines basically is what
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you're being asked
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to do but maybe it's just because of the the lighting or whatever but the this
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area there's not so much light reaching the fur over here and so this part back
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here also is getting gonna get shaded in a little bit
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well happily this is one of these areas where i can tell you that the other
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years the same thing just flipped around a mirror image before I get to that list
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of possible just point out quickly
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the direction that these little hairs are growing in up here kind of quite a
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vertical right here in this area where is this line that I put in initially
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again to describe your kind of radiating out from the inside
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from the center of the the face and that becomes kind of true of the fur in
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general i like that phrase radiating out it is sort of all pointing out like the
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face of a clock or something on the fur tends to grow
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roughly speaking in that direction well let's go ahead now and I'm going to do
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in time-lapse do the other ear basically exactly the same way
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so you see the area of the ear
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the complex actually if you're trying to do a faithful in a realistic drawing of
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a cat but it's not necessary to get so concerned with these details i think if
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you get the basics of it you know
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are people really looking at the ears when they look at the your cat trying
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I don't think so they're going to be mainly looking at the eyes and the nose
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and so forth so anyway I think it's time to start moving on to drawing the fur
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and as i said i'm gonna i tried to reserve some space here at the end of
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this video so as to do some of the four real time drawing for is notoriously
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time consuming so I can't promise that you're going to see everything down the
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real time but i'm starting with these stripes here and go ahead and darken
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goes in as I said there is a tendency for the fur to kind of radiate out from
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the inside of the like from a central point on the face and so all this fur
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here which is fairly short at least uh on the type of the breed of cat eyes it
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was looking at as I study different photos you can see the individual hairs
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and so it is wise to make some note of the direction that they're pointing and
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in and begin to replicate that in your drawing
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so I'm getting all that into place here at a little bit of whiteness
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I found in this area near the ear which should hopefully also conveys that you
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know gives us some contrast there and helps to hear you know how it helps to
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convey the shape of the ears
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I think over here where I have a very simple circular shape that's going to
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have to go and be replaced by a more jagged edge that is you know filled with
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indications of the fur
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by the time you get over here i believe it is mostly horizontal
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directionally speaking i believe there is a horizontality to the cats for you
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know it i went back and listened to the kitten the with video that I did I'm how
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to draw a kitten and it's filled with terrible english accents
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so if you want to hear me do more horrible english accents go ahead and
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check out my how to draw a kitten video i will link to the the whole the entire
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playlist of all these various animals in the info box of this video in the
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description and up here between these two stripes
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it seems to me fairly consistent among striped cats in the striped cat
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community they seem to favor a number of smaller stripes here in between straight
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up the middle and i'll be honest i'm just roof
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you know this is not based on examining some sort of pattern from a photo and
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trying to carefully replicate it this is me just sort of dropping in stripes
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willy nilly willy clearly with hooked with wild abandon
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but you know probably there are people out there watching this video you know
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more about cats than I do
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probably because it's guaranteed and they could tell me if there is
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consistency in this patterning i'm particularly curious about this idea of
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there being maybe one major one here another new smaller one off to the side
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and then this sort of patterning that I've been talking about right up the
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middle
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I wonder that is fairly consistent from one cat to another or indeed do you see
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them going horizontally across I have a feeling you down
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I'm just gonna throw it in my my ignorance
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I have a feeling it
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using my intuition I i'm guessing that it's kind of like that
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in any case this shows you the basic direction as we get down here to the
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eyes again seems to me that there
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it's lightening up and getting wider as we get closer to that initial shape of
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the eye so you could almost kind of just my shorthand way I'm gonna try to get
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some gray and hear that is not really showing the direction of the first just
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right hopefully helping you to see how white it gets in this area just outside
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it's like it goes completely black
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just outside the eye and then it goes white again just outside of that
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blackberry and then you get into the more mixed for area i guess now's as
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good a time as any for me to go in and start and continuing this darkness up
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the bridge of the nose and you know as usual I can sort of sense the the length
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of this video stretching out going
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minute by minutes into a longer and longer video and I fear some people just
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won't even click on a video that is 30 40 50 minutes long so i do have to sort
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of rain at in terms of CH showing everything from here on out real time
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but how about if i shift focus on the camera shipped down to the lower part of
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the face so that i can i start to point out some of the shading down there and
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then it may be time to just sort of kick it in the time lapse and move towards
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completion but let's go ahead and draw the lower part of the cat's face
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ok so i wanted to quickly show how this area down here and we had a circle down
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there to begin with that probably needs to be adjusted
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to suggest a slightly more triangular shaped to the jaw as it comes down here
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to the chin and I'm not trying to indicate for here right now I'm just
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going in and getting some gray
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so as to help you see the shape of this white area both pencil falling to the
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floor
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recorded on youtube for all eternity
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but coming up here this this whole basic shape down here is defined by whiteness
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hopefully that is true of a wide variety of cat breeds and not just the photos
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that I studied up here as we move north from the mouth
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can we use directions north west from the mouth . we are going to get some
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shading in here and if you want to really go for the details
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I do believe you can see individual hairs again sort of radiating out from
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the center of the face but very short i believe the fur in this part of the face
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very very short very trim you know when they're when cats go to the barber they
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say please just really keep it real short there across the front of my face
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it's just they can't stand it have it get real shaggy there
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so across this area i had put in you know it somewhat random shape
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I don't know it's me you know based on a photo that i looked at I don't know if
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there's any consistency from one breed to another but at least one type of cats
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and there's darkness
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sort of i'm making it kind of a gray but right along here as I said quite a lot
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of white just beneath the eye and let's see oh we're gonna get down to this area
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where you're going to see the whiskers and I thought maybe that could be one of
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the last things I'm just gonna sort of - in a fair amount of grey here so as to
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show you how you might be able to draw whiskers in here with any racer
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so I'm kind of cheating a little bit here i'm going to refine the shading
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quite a bit later on but i wanted to get in sort of a base of grey here so that i
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can switch to a brand new pencil right out of the box that has the nice you
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know
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untouched eraser that will allow me to go in here and start going across
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excuse me and hopefully you can begin to see how this might allow you to two
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indications of whiskers
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you do want to pay attention to the direction the whiskers tend to go strip
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start horizontal near the top and then begin with gentle curves to begin
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pointing and down
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I guess a little diagonally you might say they're also our whiskers I don't
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know they're called whiskers white hairs of the sort right up here in what we
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would think of as the eyebrow region the I bravia
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region as we call it not nearly as many as down near the nose i would say maybe
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three or four at most but what I'm gonna do later on is used whitewash to make
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this white her still
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I thought I'd give you the option for those of you who don't want to mess
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around with white wash which is an opaque white paint you can maybe get
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away with just using any racer for conveying a little bit of the whiskers
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well I am sad to say that I think we have reached maybe the end of the real
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time drawing i hope you got enough of my point is I'm drawing the fur I know that
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can be you know a contentious issue for some of my viewers
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they're like I got everything was fine until you started racing through the fur
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well it really is a time-consuming thing to do the kind of drawing that I'm going
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to do here this morning
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for me it's morning for you it may well be the middle of the night but to do
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this kind of drawing this level of detail it's gonna take me like three
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hours altogether and i would think and i am not going to upload a three hour
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video folks not the day anyway so i'm going to go ahead and refocus so as to
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cover all the rest of the fur and so forth and even bring in my black and
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prismacolor my trusty black prismacolor which is really just a fairly ordinary
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black colored pencil to darken things and i'm going to do all that stuff and
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maybe just come back to do a little bit of the wash application real time before
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we wind down the video
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yeah
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yeah
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yeah
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all right well as you can see I put a lot of time into rendering the fur and
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probably two hours all together to achieve this effect and yeah sadly you
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can't just show all 2 hours real-time like that but you know maybe in the
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future I can come up with
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finally the video that focuses on forever and creating the effect of fur
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but for now what I want to do is add a little bit of whitewash which is an
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opaque white paint you have to dilute it with water a little bit and then that
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allows you to add some highlights like I'm going to do right now to the eyes
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now of course you could just try to avoid putting pencil there or erase it
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away but with the whitewash you can get real sharp edges to the White that's
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pretty hard to do when you're erasing my way to the White of the page and I
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didn't mean to say that all you need to go out and buy some like wash i just
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wanted to show people the effects that were possible if you did decide to
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invest it doesn't cost that much
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invest I'm going to invest in white wash it's only like two dollars or something
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to get a tube of whitewash
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but as I said don't forget to dilute it a little bit with water well i'm going
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to go ahead and finally one last little bout of time lapse here to use this
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whitewash to get just that last bit of contrast in here maybe on the sum of the
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whiskers and so forth and then i'll be back with a few final words
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all right
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others my video on how to draw a cat please let me know what you thought my
33:18
apologies for having taken so long since the last animal related video that's why
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i put a little extra time into this one I wanted to make it something special
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sort of make up for the lost time but hopefully i'll have another animal how
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to draw video a lot sooner but until then I want to thank anyone who has
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supported me by getting any of my books like Brody's ghost and miki falls both
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of these graphic novels and the realism challenge probably the closest thing to
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what you saw in this video today and teaching you hyper realistic drawing
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illustrating techniques and of course mastering manga and mastering manga to
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always super appreciative of anyone who helps me out by getting any of those
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books but let me go ahead and lay down this pencil
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I want to thank you all for watching this video I hope you found it helpful
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and i'll be back with another real soon1