Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
One thing I like to do as an artist is to draw special personalised artworks for friends as gifts! Both because I'm a bad gift giver but also because I find personalised art a better gift than anything I could buy especially in this day and age. But here's the first one I did for one of my mods that I think is one of the better ones to this day:
Anyway this piece is actually one of the presents I gave Sean this year for his birthday! Our social media is always full of goofy doggo and catto videos and it also takes up 90% of our messages to each other. So I thought I'd make his present animal themed! We've been following this Korean youtuber named Claire who has 10 cats for a while now and our favourite cat of hers is this Munchkin Scottish Fold cat named Lulu!
He mostly has a clueless derpy face and is always hungry for snacks that he hunts and steals them like a thief! He also stands up on his hind legs a lot to reach up to higher places since he's so stubby!
Source: reddit
We actually only recently discovered that he's the cat in the big steppy meme too! I don't know how it took us so long to realise it actually.
But anyway, since Sean's favourite cat is Lulu I wanted to try drawing him but in a different style than what I normally do. I wanted a slightly more realistic drawing of Lulu but still a little cartoon-looking, and I came across this youtube tutorial that I thought was perfect!
This tutorial is by an artist named Genevieve, and while I've never seen her other videos before she does have a nice style that I wanted to try. She draws a bunny instead of a cat but I tried to apply the same techniques so I could draw Lulu. I had to find some reference photos first though but thankfully there's plenty online. I ended up with quite a few cute ones. Don't mind the one in the bottom right, that's another one of Claire's cats named Momo.
Anyway, I decided the first one in the top left would be perfect for a portrait to practise on since it was big and clear. Using that I started to do an outline of his features.
Next was to get the base colour which was a little difficult but we blend the image and get the majority colour which I think was close to this brown.
The hardest part was definitely trying to fill in his other fur colours. I think the main problem was that Lulu's other fur colours were more in stripes and not like the bunny in the video, so it was quite difficult to make it look natural. I did the best I could to make it look like fur but I think it kinda clashed with the clean outline.
I tried quite a few times to make it look better but I didn't really know how, so I added some shadows to give him more depth at least and I'm not sure it looks good. I think I need more practise with this style or I need to change it up a bit more so it looks cleaner. But in the end we get this:
This took me a few hours and I wasn't happy with it. I thought there was no way I could give this to Sean for his birthday so I scrapped this idea and went in a different direction. But I think this was still a good try though even though it's meh.
Here's a timelapse:
I might try this style again but maybe with something different. Maybe people will be easier to draw in this style since there's no fur? Hair is quite difficult to draw and I'm still struggling with it, but you know what they say, practice makes perfect!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
