Cat Drawings

I am still sketching every day for at least 30 minutes. Most times that does not feel like enough time. I wish there was more time for drawing and painting, but I'm grateful to be squeezing in at least 30 minutes per day. Progress is slower now that class is done. It takes time and effort to keep the habit going, including mapping out what to draw and focus on each day, and learning to evaluate my own drawings. I am working to figure out how to use various tools, pencil, pen, brush pen, and watercolor to name a few, although I mostly stick with pencil and pen. I am working to figure out how to make marks that capture and convey what I want to show. I am working to figure out my relationship to detail. That's just some of what's going on!!

Two nights ago, I worked on sketching cats. My intention was to capture a contour drawing of the cat and select an area to "finish". The cats had other plans. While the gray ones were mostly cooperative, they were shifting a bit too often. This was the start of one that was going well and her body placement was interesting. I used her glorious ears as a marker to figure out where her hips and back portion were in relationship to those ears. One of the things I'm trying is to make my initial lines lighter, so if they need refinement the drawing is less messy.

After several partial contour drawings, I switched to her face. Most of my drawing goals for the current 4-6 weeks are general, but one of the specific ones is to work on cat's eyes. It's weird, but in the last several weeks I've had some good experiences starting with the eyes and working my way out. That's what I did with this sketch. This is different from what I've mostly read or been told, although Roz tends to do this for her portraits. The lesson that I take from this is that I need to be willing to experiment and try different ways of approaching a drawing.

This is where having limited time can be a problem. It takes time to figure out and make marks to show value and texture. Also, I don't think I have the stamina to finish a complete sketch yet. I sketched about 45 minutes on the night I was sketching cats. When I got to this point, my time was up and I was ready to be done.

It's hard to figure out how to show 3 dimensions in 2 dimensions, but I think I'm making progress. One of the things I'm interested in is figuring out how to show the slope / depth of how a cat's face shifts up from the nose to the forehead. I know from looking at cat's in profile that the part straight back from the nose angles up and away.  As it gets close to being even with the eyes, the angle shifts. It shifts again as the nose shifts to the forehead. When I was looking at the cat straight on, this shift was mostly represented as a change in value.

While I like this sketch, I also really, really, really want to figure out how to convey the same understanding of values, but with less detail.