Cat painting from photographs a demonstration in cat painting from photographs
In this cat painting from photographs demonstration the photo of the cat is a three quarter view which means that three quarters of the face is nearest us from the right hand side of the nose to the left hand side of the cats head.
Here I am measuring with the pencil the distance from the right corner of the left eye to the bottom of the cats chin and mark this distance off with my forefinger. Keeping this same measurement I then place the top of the pencil at the top of the head and see where my forefinger comes to on the cats head so I can compare these two distances which will help me constructing the portrait, I then transfer these measurements to my paper.
We can get the angle of the eyes by holding our pencil horizontally and held at both inner corners of the eyes and then transferring this angle to our paper. Here I have drawn a circular shape for the outline of the head unlike a human head which is oval shaped and I have drawn in a horizontal line through the centre of the head.
Holding the pencil vertically here I am finding how far the right side of the left ear comes to the left corner of the left eye and then we can put these marks on our paper to indicate these areas.
After basically drawing in the eye shapes on the horizontal line that I drew in I am now transferring the above measurement to the paper and checking that it is right with the photograph.
Here the nose and chin have been drawn in and you can find the length of the nose by holding the top of the pencil at the top of the eye (Eyelid) on the photograph and mark off with your forefinger on the pencil where the bottom of the nose comes. Then compare this measurement with say from the top of the ear to the bottom of the ear. If you need more information in pencil measuring see pencil measuring.
Look to see where all the darks on the photograph or model are and broadly paint these in with burnt umber, here I have gone over these burnt umber colours again with a medium yellow ochre to get the colour I wanted. What I am trying to do here is to gauge what colours I see on the photo, the burnt umber colour was just a basic colour I put onto the paper to get us started and onto this other more accurate colours were added.