Drawing Cat Hair Exercise

Hello! Continuing with drawing exercises here - they're great for getting your drawing/painting fix when you don't have time, inspiration or energy for doing a bigger piece. This time, I wanted to practice drawing fur. Since I live with a cat, I decided to photograph a section of his coat and draw that. For this exercise, I used Prismacolor Premier pencils, on a hot press watercolor paper. The whole picture is approximately a 3.5" square. 

Following are the stages of my work, so that you can see how the whole process developed.

First, I swatched the color combos for the main areas of the photo.The swatches didn't print very accurately, but I was comparing the swatches with the photo itself . Because this was a small project, I just used the photo on my phone for reference. Otherwise, I would most likely do a good quality printout on some type of photo paper.

These are the pencils I ended up using. The French and Warm Greys were the most heavily utilized ones.

Drawing stage 1 and 2 below - after I roughly sketched the main clumps of hair, I began establishing some of my largest blacks, which also helped me orient the rest of the details throughout the project. In stage two, I laid down some white (you can somewhat see the shiny parts in the bottom right hand corner) as an underlayer, where I was planning to scratch off upper layers of pigment later for fine, stray hairs.

Stage 3 and 4. Layering continued. Basically establishing underlayer color areas and main shapes of fur clumps, while slowly introducing more details.

Meanwhile, the model himself (named Ozzie) decided to visit and check out the progress.

Stage 5 and 6. Continuing to add more layers and details.

And here is the finished piece compared to the actual photo. The little stray hairs and highlights were achieved with Tombow Mono Zero eraser and exacto knife. I think that I, more or less, got the gist of Ozzie's fur. The actual drawing is a bit more saturated, richer and the blacks are darker.

As a side note... Recently, I got myself a cheap, wooden cutlery drawer organizer at a dollar store. I use it to keep/organize my tools during a project, and I find it very practical. Before, I just used a small, flat  tray, but now I can separate the pencils into colour groups, keep erasers and such in their own compartment, but still carry it all in one "box".

Thank you so much for visiting today. Wishing everyone a great and safe day.