Drawing A Cat

I needed to draw a cat for my new picture book Bears on the Stairs, but unfortunatelly the cute puss Maddy, who might have been my model, had gone back home. Drat!


Fortunately I remembered a wonderful old book I've had since I was a teenager, called Drawing A Cat. It was printed in 1945 (!) and was originally a present from my Dad to my Mum, who also loved to draw. Mum gave it to me when I showed real interest in drawing.

It's great for reference, which is very useful to help make any animal drawing 'believable'. I sketched various key poses from Clare Turlay Newberry's wonderful observational drawings, to create this crib sheet to work from:

Using these sketches as a starting point, I then simplified some features and exaggerated others, to turn fairly realistic drawings into something more suitable for a picture book character.

I talk a bit more about this process, and show step-by-step how I draw a cat, in this short film, which you might find helpful if you are learning to draw cats:

I ended up using quite a few of  Clare Turlay Newberry's  poses in Bears on the Stairs. Here's one drawing, finished in pastels, adapted from the standard sitting poses.

You can peek at the first stages of my pastel artwork for the book here, and see some of the cat illustrations in progress.

Regular readers to this blog will know that cats have been both an inspiration and a bit of a nightmare in the studio. Have you read my stories about the two different flying cats? 

I used to draw our cat Smudge every year for my husband, as a birthday card. I chose various activities they shared.

For instance, this is one of him trying to put Smudge to bed in the kitchen. She was a very grumpy cat, who would much rather have come upstairs to bed with us...


I used a ginger puss rather like the one in Bears on the Stairs as a letterhead design for the very first letter I sent out to publishers - the one which ultimately got me my very first book! You can see the whole thing, and read about how to contact publishers here.

My other book that features a ginger puss, this time called Jasper, is The Show at Rickety Barn. I like to draw ginger cats, as they are such a gorgeous colour on the page.