Draw With Me: Cats

I can't believe it's Thursday once again (have I been sleepwalking through my days?), and time once more for "Draw With Me" with Danny Gregory from Sketchbook Skool.

Last week we drew dogs, so this week equal time was made for cats. Given how many I have sheltered and fed over the years, I should be better at the cats, but their faces are a challenge—the shape of the eyes, the teensy noses (in some cases), capturing any other expression besides pissed off...cats are harder than they look. (Danny has promised live horses for next week, but color me skeptical.)

I decided, once again, to follow Danny's lead, so I pulled out multiple tools and mixed it up, using different ones for different cats—the gray Pitt brush pen from last week for a couple, a Micron pen in brown for the Siamese or Burmese or whatever Catherine may be, a water-soluble Tombow marker that is fun to bleed with water after you draw for Badger, plus my trusty Uniball, squiggly in one case and smooth in another. It was fun!

I added watercolor to everything afterwards, and put in some whiskers and highlights with my white Signo pen, because whiskers are VERY important to cats.

Between the watching of the video, the drawing, the painting, and the writing up afterwards, this sucked up two hours of my day, which might explain why I am surprised that it is Thursday: No matter how quick you plan to be with your art, it's always more complex and engaging than you expect it to be.

#Drawwithme #SketchbookSkool

Various pens as mentioned, mostly Paul Jackson watercolors, in my Bee Sketchbook.

Essence

Continuing my thoughts from the previous post, sometimes in a portrait the likeness is elusive; but sometimes it doesn't matter so much, because what you want to capture is the essence of that person, not every mole and wrinkle and blonde streak.

That's the case in this little drawing that is also of my friend Bix, but that captures the "real" person we who have experienced her hospitality at Bandouille would recognize. The pictures in my mind of Bix are two: One is of a vivacious hostess, sitting at the farmhouse table drawing everyone out and making them feel that whatever they are saying is fascinating (it usually wasn't, we drank a lot of wine), while the other is of the quiet, focused person who, whether she is cooking delectable dishes in her kitchen or sitting on the sidelines of an art workshop (in what must be an uncomfortable chair), is turned inward, so focused on creation that you can almost feel the force.

This little picture is what I see when I picture Bixxy, so rather than try another realistic portrait, here is the essence of Bix.

Uniball pen, Paul Jackson watercolors, in Bee Sketchbook.

Elusive likenesses

Sometimes, when making a portrait of someone, you get everything so close to right—the shape of the face, the tilt of the eyes, the squareness of the jaw, the color of the cheeks—and yet...it's just not them. That was my quandary today, when trying to do a portrait of my friend Bix for her birthday. It was an impulsive attempt (her big event snuck up on me during these quarantine days that all feel pretty much the same), and I perused a lot of photos from her Facebook page, trying to find one that had the perfect Bixxy personality.

It was hard to find a good one, not because she's not photogenic (she is), but because in 99 percent of her photos she has her face affectionately pressed up to someone else's—a friend, a student, most often one of her three beautiful children (who all look like their mum). She's a popular one! The photo I found was another like that, but with the face turned forward enough that I could extract the other person and still make it work. But...it doesn't, quite.

Happy Birthday, my friend—I'll try another one sometime and see if I can't better capture the essence of Bix!

Uniball pen, Paul Jackson watercolors, in Bee Sketchbook.