How to Paint Cute Scruffy Cats for Beginners | Easy Tutorial to Master Loose Watercolor Painting

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 everyone so today we're going to be developing the cat motif if you like the cat theme and I just wanted to show you what I've been up to since the last time we did some cats. Some of these cats here I have been working on a little bit further because some of them I didn't like them and then I read somewhere I think it was on Happy Painting Club that if you don't like your painting it's not finished. So I've been going over these remember the last time we did this I said some of these look like rats and some of them look like dogs and all the rest of it so I've been trying to improve them a little bit and this one particularly influenced by the the neurographic art idea where you break up the shape with lines and then you fill with a pattern and it seems like there's been an invasion of mice in here too that's a bit of a worry. I've swapped my, there's some neurographic work there in the background, I've swapped my faithful old Staedtler pens here, I swapped them now for the Micron, the Pigma, Pigma is it? Yes, Pigma Micron, because they seem to be more waterproof so I've treated myself to a set of those. I've also got these upside down pens which are great, these white Signo Uniball white pens and they are absolutely fantastic, they give a very opaque, as you can see, a very opaque line over watercolour which is great. So anyway I carried on exploring a bit and messing around with these ones for example and that was what I was using the Gallo paints for and then I decided I was going to use some ink rather than just the pens, I thought why not have a go with some Sennelier ink, some drawing ink. I used a drop, a drip pen, yes they are, they usually are drip pens but they are dip pens supposedly and I made these wild creatures here just by drawing in paint on some sketch paper, I did some circles of colour using Gallo paints and then I randomly dropped in quite large amounts and you can see it's all blotty and splotchy, reminds me of, I can't remember the first name but wasn't his name Sol? There was an artist who did a lot of very, pretty ugly really, lots of ink and stuff but so anyway so those are those and then I kind of refined that down a little bit and we ended up with this and so this is the cats that we are going to do today. You know how sometimes you're in a mood and you don't feel as if you can do anything? It happens a lot doesn't it? So there's one thing I can do, it's paint a circle, well an oval and so I'm going to give myself a break and meditate again upon the cat. Now I've got a set of a Gallo paints here which I'm very lucky to have and this is it swatched out and this is it in reality and I've just picked up some Chromite Brown. I'm going to have to put that next to it so you'll know what I'm painting with some Chromite Brown and when this cat is going to have his tummy lifted out a little bit to make it a little bit lighter and I'm just making this up as I go along so then I'm going to get some more Chromite Brown mixed with some Quinacridone Gold, Red Gold, so that'll be kind of darker and then I'm going to give him some stripes and a tail and some feet and some colour around his face and then we're going to let him dry a little bit and see how he turns out and then the next one what shall we do? Shall we do this one in which is a lovely mauve colour, I'm not sure what colour you would call that, you can mix these colours yourself with your ordinary set of paints but sometimes it's nice to have them on hand and then I'm going to give him some more stripes perhaps in the same colour only more intense so that is also Noturno Full Strength and then so we'll give him the same kind of tail but maybe we'll have it lying down so dark at the end and then a little bit lighter and his feet this one's got a fluffy tail and he wants some ears if you don't want those to be stripes they could be paws and these cats are being painted on Bockingford 100% cellulose paper from the Bockingford mill and now this one I want to do in a kind of beige colour and the one thing that the Gallo doesn't have in this set is Naples Yellow so I've got some Naples Yellow here from Schmincke and we will complement that with Chromite Brown okie dokie so there's three cats now my next thing I'm going to take my dip pen with nothing on it I'm just going to give them some character to their tails there's no ink on this pen it's just scratching into the paint and where the paint has started to dry you'll get lines showing up lighter or darker depending on how much the paint has dried so we'll just then use some of the paint to just draw around his ears then I have a dip pen so I'll use some ink this is Sennelier Walnut ink we'll start on this end shall we these cats are going to be funky cats put a little bit more dark in his tail and his eyes are going to go about here I think and then the nose so then we want to put some whiskers in this paper's quite damp now that the paint has hit it so the pen's not working terribly well but that's fine so now we do the ears on this one and the eyes and the nose and the mouth I didn't really finish this one did I with his outlines my idea is the paint and the lines don't necessarily match up it gives it more freedom these are a little bit similar to the ones we did the other day and then our little Siamese at the end here and just draw some lines with the pen for them to sit on there's a lot of texture here where those paints melded together when the eyes are dry I can put a light into the eyes I think this one might want a little bit more colour here okay so there we are three cats we'll let that dry and come back and see what we need to do well it's not quite dry yet but I just suddenly thought I do need to do some flowers for them to be sitting amongst no question about that and then after these lines are dry we will probably colour those in probably gold cats amongst the tulips tiptoeing no doubt if they're anything like ours our cats like to sneak up on people and each other got five of them so there's always a cat somewhere if you are a member of the channel you'll see videos of the cats from time to time which is quite entertaining sometimes if you're interested in cats it's been one of those days today where we have been constantly interrupted by this and that so now I'll let that dry okay so these pussycats are dry now and I'm just going to take a little bit of ph martin's bleed proof white and just put a little highlight on the nose I've already done the highlights on the eyes the whites of the eyes which cats don't really have but it looks better when you give them to them and then we will switch to the gold which I want to use to colour in the flowers and I'm just using a size three round brush this is a round synthetic that's to say nylon draw well brush need is quite a small one because I'm doing something fairly small trying to keep inside the lines not something I do much of but for this sort of need to you can always go over the outside lines again afterwards if you cover too much of them this gold paint from gene haynes daniel smith that is to say is is quite good it's quite opaque and it dries quite shiny and quite nice you could use the kiritaki starry colours as well if you have that lots of people have that I've got that one too um maybe I'll give the cats a few specks of gold on their tails just to lighten them up a little bit in the middle there where it could be said to be catching the light I think that one probably wants she wants a kind of more of a light gold this is Mao Mao this one come on let's have some opacity here gene yeah this is my mouth our Siamese okay and um I think that's probably about it got their whiskers they've got their eyes nose mouth tails and got their flowers for companions so I think we'll call that a day and you could do more you could make them a little bit more funky random inky sort of effect you could come back in with a bit more ink if you wanted to as well so there we are that's three more cats to join the menagerie so there's the final painting and here's a quick look at some of the other cats which I painted while I was working on this video we're a five cat household these days so I had plenty of willing models I hope you found this enjoyable please subscribe and turn on notifications if you did and visit our website for free downloads of all our paintings while you're there a donation in our tip jar via paypal would be greatly appreciated so I'll say bye bye for now everybody and I'll see you again soon bye