How to Draw, Paint and Embellish Cute Cats in Watercolor - Easy Step by Step Tutorial for Beginners

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Diane and my passion is painting and creating nature-inspired watercolours in my studio which are easy for you to do too. I share all my paintings with you on YouTube and on our website dianeanton.com you can find free downloadable sketches for all the videos to help you make the most of your painting journey. And if you'd like a little bit more we also have channel memberships with loads of perks for you So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. Hi everybody, welcome to my studio. Diane here. I hope everybody's well and fighting fit etc. Today we're going to have a go at painting and drawing even some kitty cats. I know this is a popular subject and it's one that's caused me much wrenching out of hair and teeth because you know they're taxing cats are we've got how many have we got five and each one of them has to have a different diet and they're all different personalities and they fight over their beds and yes that's life with cats. So in honour of the cat I'm going to show you one way of drawing them and another way of painting them and they're going to be whimsical not realistic because I've got enough the real thing I don't need any more. This is the palette I'm going to use today this is a palette of colours in a ceramic palette dish just because why not and here I've got my three primaries I'm going to be doing these in a wet in wet where the primary colours are going to mix but I've also got some secondaries here so we've got cobalt blue this is this could be cadmium yellow it's actually chevening and yellow but let's say for the sake of argument it's cadmium yellow light this is could be permanent rose could be opera could be alizarin crimson any one of the slightly cooler blues reds or pink and this is quinacridone gold I've got them all laid out here different options I was going to talk about that I've got this is actually schmincke the one in here but I also have Daniel Smith's quinacridone gold they're slightly different Daniel Smith's one is slightly darker it doesn't really matter then I've got turquoise here this is a chevening and turquoise but any turquoise would do and that's a mix of basically blue and green so you don't need it if you haven't got it the green I've got here is sap green there are lots of different kinds of sap green or you could use hookers green okay so just a basically a neutral green this is my permanent rose my alizarin crimson whatever I decide to use for the red and then I've got here I've got chevening and orange you could use cadmium orange or any other orange this is my purple which is obviously a mixture of this and this cobalt and red this one here I think I've put out quinacridone purple I've also got dioxazine mauve dioxazine violet they're all very much of a muchness not much to choose between them this is my cobalt blue which is from schmincke but everybody makes that as well cadmium yellow pale and chevening and yellow for the yellow it doesn't matter what brand you have and doesn't matter what the name of it is basically what you want is the three primaries red yellow and blue and then if you fancy it quinacridone gold because that's a nice lift and then the three or four tertiaries you've got sorry secondary colors the green the purple and the orange this is just extra these two here are so that's what I'm going to be painting with I'm going to be using a piece of um actually I'm going to lash out today because it's Saturday why not I'm going to use a piece of arches 140 pound watercolor paper and then I'm going to also use a brush and that's going to be I'm going to use this one a da vinci usuri sable I think it's a synthetic sable I don't possess anything as expensive as a real sable brush uh number 10 so a 10 round with a point doesn't matter too much about the point because we're not doing anything very pointed today um and then I'm going to grab my uh sketchbook a sketchbook a sketchbook with a page in it that hasn't been used okay and I'm going to show you a way a way just a way of um drawing a cat and then we're going to paint them so bear with me because when I paint when I draw cats often I find they look like dogs and I've been puzzling about this for a while what is it why do my cats look like dogs and so I thought well I have to try something different so I'm going to show you what I um came to in the end I decided I know sometimes when I paint birds I start with the legs and I thought well maybe I can do something similar with the cat so I thought I'll start with the nose and I thought let's make the nose a little bit heart-shaped just because why not because cats are adorable and then the mouth like this so we have something between a cat and Hercule Poirot and then the next thing that's distinctive about cats is their whiskers so we put those in and now it's no longer Hercule Poirot but it could be Top Cat couldn't it or Pink Panther and then we need the eyes now cat's eyes are um not directly above the nose that would be silly they're off to one side and they're not too high if they were very high they would look wrong so I'm going to start with a circle and two circles evenly spaced and then a way of doing it is to draw a pupil in the center and shade that in so that that gives you a bit of realism and you can do this however however much you want the realism you can just do a circle with a dot in the middle if you want then the key is here this is the center sorry this is the um inside of the eye you see the point there the ear lines up with that and the space between here and here is a little bit more than that to where the ear starts and then the ear is a curve like that and this is the same so you go up from the inner edge of the ear of the eye and then it's curved on both sides and that's the key I was doing the ears like that and they're not like that they're curved like that and then the head is a curve in between like that and you know at this point you could say oh well yes but no but the nose is too big so because you started with the nose you know you might have found that proportions went out a little bit so let's rub it out and then put a smaller nose in okay and then you're going to draw the head and so that's just basically a bit of a circle and then the body which is a bigger circle and you can sort of you know make a circle as you go along and then the feet the legs in the front a bit of a straight line on the center like that a bit of a curved line on the outside edge like that and little putties like that and then you can have the tail going up like this or more typically the tail would go around the front of the paws like this we've got a cat a Siamese kind of thing and she sits like a little statue out of a an Egyptian tomb she's very elegant and you can change the shape of course to suit your own cat you can have it fat or if you want it to be really whimsical you can do away with all the details and just have a very bare outline of the cat but that's the way to do the face i think i've put the eyes a little bit too high so i'm going to rub out the nose i'm quite happy with the ears but i'm going to rub out the nose put it in again here and quickly do that you see you can just adjust it so it's a good idea to practice drawing these things first in pencil or whatever and until you're happy and that's that's the way to learn how to paint to draw a cat okay so now we're going to have a go at painting a wet in wet cat and i've given myself today the treat of a piece of um arches watercolor paper i'm just wondering which side is the right side i think that's the right side it's hard to tell but um yeah i think that's the right side so i'll turn it over it's got a couple of blobs of paint on it from the what can i do um i'm using i'm going to use a brush i don't normally use let me see how that works out for me um this is a da vinci american brush size 10 it's a synthetic sable i'm pretty sure it is um so let's dive in shall we and first thing to do is to paint i'm going to i'm going to put two cats on here and i need to look at it a little bit from the side but i'm just going to paint in a sort of elongated oval there a bit like what we did for the birds before and another one next to it and we'll see how this goes i'm going to try and make this work so we have two two cats um tried and tested quinacridone gold just going to drop some of that in around here and um i think i'll put pink on the other side these are going to be whimsical don't be afraid of the color and i'm just going to indicate their ears at the top here with the brush which um i'm i'm going to have there'll be pen work on top so you know um we'll be able to sharpen up the details so i'm just kind of putting something remotely resembling the feet and i think this one i'm going to be dramatically uh what's the word rash and uh painting a tail going up and um do we need another color in there i wonder i think i might just pop in a little bit more quinacridone just to um let that be filled up and then the next one um i think we'll do this in completely different colors i think i'll start with some cobbled blue maybe and we'll let's start at the top with that too and pop in two ears and then let that come down and cobbled blue always makes me think it's crying out for um violets or mauve or whatever so really what we're trying to do is just get some lovely happy colors here and fill that in a little bit so that that can bleed and being as it's arches paper it will hopefully give us a really nice mix of colors on the paper hopefully so we've given him a tail that goes around and this one has tails going up which gives us perhaps a little bit of variety in the design and now i have to wait for that to dry and just notice i've got a little bit of pigment there that's kind of crunched together so take that out and same here spread that out a there we are so now we need to wait a few minutes until that has done its blending thing i'm going to see what that looks like afterwards when we come in to put the features and now push the cats and you might be interested to see this i've just done two more cats same idea exactly on this is bockingford paper it's a cheaper paper it's cellulose paper rather than cotton and it has a lot more texture and it's possible that this is more suitable for this kind of painting depending on how much you like the texture in your painting which is quite different from this which is the arches a very fine grade cotton paper sorry yes cotton not cellulose cotton paper and the blending is completely different from on this one this one has a much coarser i suppose you would say effect compared to this one which is quite fine and actually is nearly dry already this paper does seem to dry very quickly so i think what i can do with this one since it's probably stopped moving more or less now is i can put the hair dryer on that to finish it off drying and we'll carry on with the features so if you're not completely confident as none of us is often about your positioning of the features and so on you could start by putting this in with pencil just as a tryout so remembering that your eye needs to go with the inside of the eye lined up with the inside edge of the ear in order to retain that cat-like appearance and i think that's probably okay so we'll ink that in and the pupil of the cat's eye is fairly small i think you probably would say looking a bit more carefully at what i've been using for my reference material so i just put a little dot of white in there and then i'm going to just do the circle around the outside of the eye like that and then i'm going to use a little bit of gouache and you could use a pencil or some kind of felt tip pen um to do the um or you could use gold a gold pen a colored pen of some sort but i just want to get some light color in there for the eye i'll wait for that to dry and then i'll make it a little bit darker than that then we have the nose which we're going to i think probably paint pink and then the hercule poirot mustache and put some whiskers in because that really is the defining feature of the cat and then the ears we will make curved on the outside edge like that and then we can come all the way around if you want don't have to ink the outside edge of the cat don't forget his feet everyone has their own way of using a pen don't they you don't have to copy my method i'm sure you have a good one too i'm going to leave that edge there rough because that looks like fur and then so let's just improve that a little bit there make that a little bit darker and that a little bit bigger you can change the character of the cat completely just by playing around with the eyes a little bit and as long as you've got this relationship here right everything's okay some shadow in his ears perhaps and then i thought it's probably a good idea to just add some color make him a bit more interesting and i've just picked up the water brush and found that that has some kind of green on it so we've gone all over everything we did before and we've got this interesting uh mottled kind of effect which i think would make quite a nice background for um some embellishments so i think that's actually quite a good thing um so now i need to come over here to do this one start with the ears this time remembering key thing is that they should be curved as long as you can uh maintain the element of cat important proportions inside edge of the eye lines up with the top of the ear and then you can go more haywire you know that's where the whimsy comes in once you've got the bare bones that make it a cat then you can play around to your heart's content that looks like you need to follow follow the paint a little bit it doesn't matter that the head seems to be too small compared to the feet and then i think again the same thing i don't know i'm not going to use the water brush because i don't think i was very pleased with that just sharpen up some of the colors there a little bit more perhaps we might want to give him some stripes on the tail on this now we need to let that dry and then we'll come in and we'll do the embellishment okay so these are completely dry now and if you're wondering why i've left such a big amount of body um with no details that's because i'm going to use this as a doodling site for for my evening in front of the television when i don't want to actually paint but i want to do something creative so i prepare the backgrounds during the day and then in the evening when i sit down to do something creative i've got this to do so i'm going to have this in front of the television if necessary and i think you'll find that what happens is when you give yourself plenty of time like that you um you come up with things that you didn't expect and you might find that you want to alter things as well so and if you use a white pen this is a gel pen from um uniball signo it's called and it will actually go over black and it will turn the black into something less less um what's the word less dominate dominant kind of thing so and then once you once you get started it's actually easier it's hard to get started i find i've been looking at this did this this morning before um lunch and got completely stuck and i was thinking i don't know maybe i have to try start again but um i've come back after lunch and now i can see where i was thinking of going and it was here so this background although it wasn't what i intended has turned out to be quite um quite uh quite a nice background and i'm quite happy to this paper this is the arches paper and um it's it's not bad actually it's quite nice to work on um better than the bockingford i think i've got the bockingford here yeah i don't know no probably not much in it actually no in fact this might be might be better because although this has shown quite a lot grain it does feel fairly smooth this is i don't know it's nice and i think i'll probably use a little bit of colored pencil as well on here and perhaps fill in some of these shapes with some color these this is a faber castell albrecht dürer set of watercolor pencils and uh i got out before i started i got out um some sort of toning colors that i hoped would would sort of go with this particular background and then you can if you want to you can sort of go over the legs for example get a nice kind of little texture there it's quite nice maybe add a little bit of purple to the tail perhaps you might want to a bit stripy so we can sort of emphasize the color that's already there underneath and this one you could do some of these concentric rings just make them tiny bit darker and then we've got some pink put a few pink highlights in it's just fun it's like going back to primary school only when they're in primary school not not everybody appreciates having the freedom to do this kind of thing do they i don't know do children do coloring in in school anymore they probably think it's time wasting and they'd be better off learning something on the computer which i don't agree with oh yeah who cares what i think um okay so let's get this working again so you can carry on doing this as much as you want two different shapes you can overlap them nice lot of spirals and flowers to remember not to press too hard with these pens and i i do think this one probably is starting to run out so i'll try this other one here yeah that's a bit better and then we could use a little bit of gold pen in here i like using the gold because it stands out really well some over here as well so it looks balanced and in the end we can go over the whole thing a little bit more purple perhaps over here there we are starting to look quite pretty i think we need a little bit of pink on this side just a little bit a few dots perhaps to balance off that side and maybe some in the middle so there we are that's that for now so number two let's um let's give him some color in his legs nice pattern coming up from the paper there and if you want to you can of course here's a thing wow look at that that's watercolor pencil for you so i suppose having done that we we had better do the same over here yes well i think that might be a little bit on the right side so i'll just we'll press with some watercolor some tissue paper on there and take some of that paint out because i didn't expect that to go quite that bright it's quite a nice kind of distressed appearance there there we are that's better and just bleed that in a little bit blend that in a bit up here you never know what's going to happen do that was bright marvelous and then so now we'll get on with the embellishment just the same try that piece of tissue on there so where you've got the color a little bit darker of course the um the white shows up a little bit better when you do this it's um it is a relaxing thing but if you're feeling tense you might find that at the beginning you perhaps want to practice on a spare piece of paper because otherwise you know it might not work the way you want it to i came across the comment somewhere not long ago i think it was on happy painter she said if you aren't happy with your painting keep going don't stop because eventually it might turn out okay so i think that's good advice and just keep making adjustments until you finally are happy i think that needs another circle around it there i was watching a video the last night when i should have been asleep um about um junk journaling and i want to know can anyone tell me what do you do with a junk journal i don't know what you do with a junk journal i know that might sound silly to some people but i mean are they for writing in are they just for looking at what are they for and if you're making one i mean i'd like to have a go but if you're making one how do you how do you take the plunge and start ripping up books i'm i think i'm gonna find that really hard it would have to be a book i didn't like i don't think i could do it to a book like the bobsy twins or jennings and derbyshire a book that i'd enjoyed reading i don't i don't think um i don't think i could disrespect the book that much i don't know what do people think about that i i'm sure it's a lovely craft and i know i've seen some beautiful work but what do you do with them when they're done questions sorry answers to the question below please so here we are then we're just doing the same thing again on this one i think i prefer these pencils when they're not wet a bit sudden they're a sudden explosion into color amazing yeah so i'm thinking of doing that i won't do it for the video i'll just do it for myself um a junk journal not exactly a junk junk like what i was thinking of was making a book with watercolor paper in it so that i could actually work in it but i wouldn't want to have all the pages covered in stencils and stamps and all the rest of it that's zen barking at the lady from the farm next door who is shouting at her cows okay we put a little bit of gold on here too zen i'm thinking my little pen to work i think these cats need some eyelashes and this one she hasn't got her ears sorted yet could put some things on her tail and i'll tell you what i know what this is this is a she has got a pendant on okay and then finally of course we need a few flowers growing and the ground and the sunshine and a little bird so we can color those in later so there we are all done apart from coloring in the flowers i don't know whether that will work with water if you do that really lightly you get a very interesting sort of blended effect i think it's quite fun i think these ways of using watercolor pencils are quite interesting and need to be explored i think i've said before that i don't i don't understand the idea of painting with great accuracy i can't see the point i'm hoping that as i get older and i become i suppose i will shaky and so on it won't matter because my style because it could lead you to despair couldn't it if you couldn't do things to the accuracy that you used to be able to i am so the sunshine some need some some sun it's very quick and easy to just pop some light in there only using a small brush doesn't need too much water and a little yellow birdie over here some canary there we are so i've added a couple more little friends for the kitty cats can you spot them i hope you give this a try and enjoy making it yours it's a nice relaxing kind of painting i think so thanks for being with me please like and subscribe and i'll see you here again soon bye for now everybody bye bye