Hi I just stumbled on your blog and I gotta say, I’m lovin your designs n art style in general. Do you mayhaps have any tips/particular methods for drawing cats ? Other than just looking at references acourse
first of all TYSM!!! I have so much fun with this stuff and it means so much to me that you guys enjoy it. but im going to hit you with my personal and possibly controversial hot take on ‘art styles’: it doesnt actually exist lol
what people call ‘style’ is just your personal shorthand for translating what you see into artwork. it’s kind of like handwriting imo. so taking Style Inspo from another artist might give you some particular look you like but you’re not actually learning to draw the thing you’re trying to draw, you’re learning to draw/imitate other people’s shorthand for the subject, which can work in the short term but is also the root of same-face syndrome, stagnation in your anatomy, etc. and theres really no reason to limit yourself to a specific style anyway because versatility is awesome
THAT BEING SAID THOUGH!!! that isnt quite what you asked and although i wont give a step by step cat drawing tutorial id be happy to show you all how i break down/stylize cats!!! bc learning how to analyze subjects from photos or from life is absolutely a skill you can hone. this won’t be a comprehensive guide by any means bc i am Not An Expert just some stuff ive learned
one thing thats really important to remember about cats is how fluid and graceful their bodies are. keeping your art from being ‘stiff’ is a hard habit to break, i’ve found that exaggerating curved lines in cats bodies and contrasting them with straight lines can work wonders for making your art flow
photo -> trace of straights vs curves -> my freehand sketch
you can right click & open these in a new tab to see them bigger! obviously i dont draw like this every time, but this is how i usually break things down in my head. you develop a ‘shorthand’ by paying attention to little consistencies in how you can draw lines.
for example: cat’s backs are usually very round and pronounced when sitting and very flat when standing. the front of the legs (both front and back) make a good ‘straight’ plane to contrast the curved back of the leg. making the top of the tail flat and the bottom more rounded or scruffy can add to the illusion of gravity (this can apply to anywhere with fluff)
OF COURSE ON THE OTHER HAND rules are made to be broken! my blackstar and barley designs are great examples of this:
theyre both big, bulky black and white cats, but blackstar is made up mostly of straight lines while barley is mostly curves. this makes blackstar look sturdy and tough, but barley looks soft and gentle despite his size.
another thing you can do to help your cat drawings flow is make sure your lines ‘follow though’. for example:
paying attention to lines that continue through different parts of the body can make your poses more fluid, more readable, and easier to exaggerate! let’s compare the drawing above with the one on the left here, where i focused on drawing each bit of the cat correctly instead of drawing them as parts of a whole:
even though the blue drawing is technically correct I hope its apparent that the movement isnt as strong and doesnt have that fluidity that just screams ‘cat’ the way that the red one does! this is also a good tip for animation lol
ONE MORE THING ILL GO OVER BC ITS IMPORTANT AND FUN IS FACES! cats are great because they have a huge range of appearances but can all still be broken down into the same simple parts.
my usual process for faces is head shape -> snout and ears -> features, like so:
and you can change the cats face by changing any of these. here’s some traces of cat faces for your consideration
and if you prefer a toonier look you can just push your shapes a bit more and simplify your lines however you like
that applies to everything ive said!! you can take whatever you like from these tips and push them as little or as far as you enjoy depending on how stylized you want to go. my work tends to be on the more realistically proportioned side of toony so best advice i can give is about that technique
hopefully you guys found this helpful!! if this post is useful to anyone at all it was worth making for me. happy drawing and remember to be confident in yourself, art is a skill that takes practice and as long as youre trying youre doing a great job
There are a few programs I use on an almost daily basis as an artist and illustrator which I find invaluable, but that seem to be unfortunately more secret than they deserve to be. Which is too bad, because they solve a lot of small workflow problems that I think a number of people would find useful!
I’ll keep this list limited to my big three, but it is organized in order of usefulness. (And incidentally of compatibility, as the latter two are Windows-only. Sorry! Please do still check out PureRef though, Mac users.)
PureRef is a program specifically designed to make it easier to view, sort, and work with your references. I actually put off downloading it initially because it seemed redundant– couldn’t I just paste the refs into my PSD files? Indeed, the only real barrier to working with PureRef is that learning the keyboard shortcuts and the clicks to move around the program takes a little while. But getting over that hump is well worth it, because it has some distinct advantages over trying to organize your refs in your actual art program.
Firstly, you’re no longer bogging down your actual PSD file with extra layers, nor having to fight with said layers at all– PureRef has no layer panel, so you never have to scramble to grab the right one. All images you paste into the program retain their original resolution data, so you can resize, rotate, crop, etc as needed without distortion. If you find yourself needing to adjust the values, color, etc of a ref image, you can just copy paste it into Photoshop, make your adjustments, and copy paste it back into PureRef.
The other great advantage is that you can toggle the program as ‘Stay On Top’ and keep it above Photoshop (or whatever else)– which was always a problem when trying to make a reference collage in a separate PSD file. I find that I just don’t look at my references as much as I should when they are on a second monitor, and this solves that problem.
I’ve used it religiously for about a year now, creating a new PureRef file for every illustration I do, as well as a few for specific characters, cultures, or settings in personal projects. As you can see in the example above, I like to sort my images into little clusters or ‘islands’ of specific content, so that I can easily scroll out to see the entire reference map, then zoom in to the relevant cluster easily.
There is one big tip I would suggest for using this program, if you have the harddrive space: As soon as you get it, turn on the ‘Embed local images in save file’ option. This will make your PureRef files bigger, but you’ll never have to deal with a ‘broken link’ if you move around the source files you originally dragged in.
This is such a simple little app that it doesn’t have a very formal name, though I think of it as ‘Work’ or ‘Work Work’ (for some reason.) It’s a timer that counts when your cursor is active in any (of up to 3) program you set it to count for, and stops counting when you change programs or idle. No starting, pausing, stopping, or forgetting to do any of those three things.
I use this one to accurately track my hours spent, both to inform myself and for logging hours spent on commissions or other client work. At the end of a work session, I take the hours spent and add them to the hours I’ve already spent on that image in a spreadsheet.
I have it set to count my three art programs (Photoshop, Painter, and Manga Studio), so based on the settings I use, it doesn’t count time that I spend doing relevant work in my browser (such as looking up an email to double check character descriptions or ref hunting), so to counter that, I set the ‘Timeout’ option in it’s menu to 360. This means it will count to 360 seconds of cursor inactivity before it considers me idle and stops counting. Since it instantly stops counting if you switch to ‘non-work’ a program, I figure this extra time just about cancels out relevant ‘non-work’ program time by counting an extra minute or so when I walk away from the computer to grab some water or what-have-you.
I use Carapace the least of these three, since my work doesn’t often have a need for creating perspective lines. But when there is architecture involved in something, this proves invaluable in simplifying that process.
Carapace lets you copy paste an image into it, and then drop in vanishing points and move them around to create perspective lines. (Though you’ll want to scale down your full res drawing or painting a bit to avoid lagging the program.) Like with PureRef, fighting the shortcuts is the worst part of it, though for myself it’s more of an issue in this program because I don’t use it often enough to remember them. Still, it gets the job done, and it’s easy to adjust the points to feel things out until you get them 'right’. Then you just copy and paste the grid back into your art program and you’ve got that information to use as need be on its own layer.
Of course, using Carapace isn’t a replacement for actually knowing how perspective works– you still have to have a sense of how far apart the vanishing points should be placed to keep things feeling believable. But it sure does save you a lot of trouble once you do have that knowledge.
So, there are my big three recommendations for programs to help your art workflow. I hope people find them useful– if you do, please share so that they climb a little higher out of their unwarranted obscurity! And if you’ve got a favorite tool like this that I didn’t cover, feel free to share it in the comments. I know I’m curious to see what else is out there, too.
A Knight in shining armor is a man whose metal has never been tested.
Or one who regularly cleans it…but yeah, “Black Knights” were called so because their armor was in terrible condition, and they were usually much more experienced, so they usually won tournaments.
I’m curious mainly where you got this concept from…
“Black Knights” need to be distinguished by context. I’m on my phone right now so I can’t link you all the sources I’d like to use, so please pardon me for that.
So, the concept of “knight in shining armour” comes from the idea of the knight-errant in medieval fiction, the sort of person who is on a quest, is all shiny and new, ready to test themselves. It also is a nod to the maintenance of equipment, or the wealth of a Knight; in the late medieval and Renaissance periods, well-off knights might have a suit of armour for warfare, a suit for tournaments, and a suit for formal occasions. These being used for different things, they were meant to be maintained well and show status and wealth.
So, where does the concept of a black Knight actually come from?
Surprisingly, most cases come from the idea of the tournament. Knights were meant to display who they were, “show their colours” (ie, heraldry), and show off their skills in combat. But if course you had some knights who didn’t want to show who they were, who they were fighting for, or which lady they favoured, etc. This sounds like a chivalric fantasy, and honestly, that’s what tournaments really became as time went by and the events became more formal.
Now, early “black Knights” , were those who did not wear dark or black armour, but in fact those who did not use their own heraldry, disguising themselves. Again, they may do this for various reasons, but the concept is they hide their identity. Occasionally, they might actually paint their shields black.
We also have the examples from the hundred years war where French and English knights painted their armour different colours: black for the French, Red for the English.
Some knights actually WOULD favour black armour or heraldry to the point they got called “black Knights”, and not as a derogative. The Polish Knight, Zawisza Czarny (pronounced “Zah-vu-shah Shar-ny”, approximately) become known for his feats of arms, and by his dark armour.
Linking back to the original quote, a Knight in shining armour could well be a black knight, as such. But more commonly, it meant he was either wealthy, or highly skilled at arms.
Or both. :P
I’ve seen enough period art to convince me that “shining armour” was often a lot darker than the chrome-plated image which the term suggests.
I’ve also long thought that the whole business of “knights in shining armour” wasn’t a medieval concept at all, certainly not the default one, but was a Regency / early Victorian fictional conceit from Romance poets and Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction. (About 10 years ago an actual expert said more or less the same thing, leaving actual amateur me feeling rather smug…) :->
This illumination features armour that’s black or dark blue in colour, but with
the carefully-delineated highlights
of a shiny surface. There are many other like it.
Armour was coloured for both decorative and practical purposes; chemical blueing with acid produces a very dark, lustrous and effectively rust-resistant finish like the one in the medieval illustration. I once had an Arms & Armor rapier with that finish on the hilt: it looked like this…
Heat-blueing, which was more blue than black, was a popular treatment for Greenwich armour of the Elizabethan period, as was browning and russetting (all of which were and are used on firearms), processes which used heat, chemicals or controlled “good rust” to create colour and also prevent uncontrolled “bad rust”.
Here’s the helmet of Sir James Scudamore’s Greenwich harness, which was once blued and gilt.
The image on the left is how it looks now, after being thoroughly scrubbed with wire wool, sand or other abrasives at some stage in the 19th century to make it “shining armour”. The image on the right is a CGI restoration of its original appearance, based on still-visible traces of colour in the grooves beside the gold strapwork.
Here’s the browned and gilt “garniture” (armour with extra bits for different styles of combat, like a life-size action figure) of George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. I don’t think grinding this beauty down to bright metal would be an improvement…
Henry VIII’s tonlet (skirted) armour for foot combat at the Field of the Cloth of Gold now looks like this:
Originally it would have been shiny black or dark blue with gilt details and the engraved panels picked out in coloured paint or enamelling - red Tudor Roses, green leaves etc., but that wasn’t “shining armour”, so…
This detail shot shows the fine score-marks left after it was sanded “clean”, with dark pigmentation in the grooves as a memorial of how it once looked.
This Renaissance painting, “Portrait of Warrior with Squire”, shows black armour on the warrior and bare-metal armour on his squire, so it’s clear that armour in art wasn’t painted black simply because artists couldn’t properly represent burnished steel.
In this article, Thom Richardson, Keeper of Armour at the Tower of London and Royal Armouries in Leeds (the actual expert I mentioned at the beginning) comes straight out and calls Scott responsible for “shining armour” vandalism:
The sets of armour are not in their original black and gold because of
over-aggressive polishing in the 19th century when, said Richardson,
“they were polished with brick dust and rangoon oil to within an inch of
their life” to fit the aesthetic of what armour should look like, all
shiny and silvery. “Walter Scott is to blame,” Richardson added
ruefully.
Scott can also be blamed, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, for creating or at least popularising that clunky, inaccurate term
“chain-mail”. It cites the first appearance in 1822 (recent when talking about mail) when a
character
in “The Fortunes of Nigel”
says:
“…the
deil a thing’s broken but my head. It’s not made of iron, I wot, nor my
claithes of chenzie-mail; so a club smashed the tane, and a claucht damaged the tither.”
Plate armour was also painted, either crudely…
…or with much more care (this style is actually called black-and-white armour); since the paint was oil-based, it also had a rust-proofing effect…
I have a notion that the more white there was on black-and-white armour, and thus the more work (by servants, of course!) needed to keep it looking good, may have been an indication of rank, status or success. Just a guess…
Armour left rough from the hammer - therefore cheaper than armour polished smooth, since every stage of the process had to be paid for - was also treated with hot oil in the same way cast-iron cookware is seasoned, again to prevent rust.
There were terms for bright-metal armour - “alwyte harness” and “white
armour” - but the existence of such terms suggests to me that they arose
from a need to describe an armour finish which needed a tiresome amount of maintenance to keep it that way. I’m betting that the last stage of a clean-and-polish was a good layer of grease, or even a beeswax sealant like the coatings used by museums today.
White armour may have been a demonstration of wealth or conspicuous consumption in the same way as black or white clothes: one needed servants constantly busy with polishing-cloths, the others needed really good colour-fast dye or lots of laundering, and all of those cost money.
One thing is certain: a knight in shining armour wasn’t the one who sweated to keep it shining. That’s what squires were for…
