Drawing Cat Behind A Fence

​I finished a new piece.  That means it’s time to write a blog post about it.  Without further ado, here’s the piece.

​Origins
There’s a certain park that’s near my house and every once in awhile, I go walking through it for excercise. At some point, I decided to keep my phone handy in case any good reference photo opportunity came up. This one time, there happened to be a cat staring at me from behind the iron gate into the valley and I snapped a pic, which became the drawing you see in this post.

Tools
To make this drawing, I used graphite pencils 8h, 2b,4b,6b, and 8b, a 2b charcoal pencil and a charcoal stick. Other tools included a kneaded eraser and my finger to blend.

​What I Did and Why I Did It

​The 8h pencil is extremely light, so that’s why you don’t see the initial outline. This gives it a slightly more realistic look. I’m not saying photorealistic, just more realistic than it would have looked if I’d had lines showing everywhere. I also tried my best to draw it as accurately as possible.

​You notice how the shading in the grass is very light and gets darker as it goes down? I did that to give the give the piece depth and make it look like there was grass far behind the cat. If I’d made all the shading the same tone, the piece would have looked flat.

​The other thing I want to point out is the iron posts.

I'd already discovered how helpful the charcoal stick was in getting the perfectly black look. I tried using a charcoal pencil at first, before I thought better of it and decided to use the compressed charcoal stick. I then used a kneaded eraser to sharpen the lines up even more and my finger to blend out the strokes.