The Eyes Have It

2/11/24 Kooper (reference photo by Chris Green)

2/15/24 Miss Maybelle (reference photo by Kate Eckhoff)

The kitties have been outnumbering the dogs lately, and I’m happy to get more feline practice. On the one hand, cats can be harder to render because their faces have more subtle forms than dogs. On the other hand, I won’t say “all cats look alike,” but in a general way, they do. Once I learned the characteristics that are common in all cat faces, it became much easier to draw them. Dogs, by contrast, seem more distinctly unique – not just from breed to breed but even within one breed.

This batch of pet portraits includes two firsts for me: a young kitten (Miss Maybelle) and a puppy (Kooper, both above). In the same way that human baby faces are not simply miniature adult faces, puppies and kittens have different proportions than their adult counterparts. The most challenging part was surviving the cuteness overload! And both have blue eyes!

2/11/24 Sherlock (reference photo by 
Sarah Kaltsounis)

2/12/24 Tabitha (reference photo by Jill Bartos)

When I show the portraits to the pet owners, I am often complimented on how well I captured their pets’ eyes. As I’ve mentioned before, I usually concentrate more than half the drawing time on the eyes. I know that the owner and the pet often have eye contact, so the eyes are the most recognizable and expressive feature. Even if the fur gets sloppy or my proportions are a little off on the ears, if I get the eyes right, the drawing will usually capture the expression well.

2/15/24 Hemi (reference photo by Holly Thurston)

When I was practicing all those human portraits from Earthsworld’s photos, I didn’t always get much practice on eyes because they were often too small or obscured by shadow to see well. With the pet portraits, I have been asking specifically (though I don’t always get them) for reference photos showing the animals’ eyes in good light, so it’s been fun and rewarding to be able to practice drawing so many eyes. When the lighting is good, a subtle shadow will be apparent at the eye’s top edge across the iris. Something I learned from France Van Stone when we drew human portraits, the shadow is cast by the eyelid. It’s hard to see in dark-eyed dogs, but it’s a little easier to see in cats’ eyes (like Olivia and Hemi, at right and below). If I can observe and capture that kind of detail, the eyes look more natural and realistic.

2/16/24 Olivia (reference photo by Joey Guido)

The most challenging portrait in this group was Olivia (at left). Given two bad reference photos (dark, low contrast, low resolution), I had to make some educated guesses about features or contours I could barely see. One thing, however, was clear in both photos: Olivia was slightly walleyed. This was an unusual and unique feature that I thought was important to capture accurately. When making portraits of humans as well as pets, it’s sometimes tempting to make asymmetrical features more symmetrical, straighten crooked noses, or otherwise make faces more generic. (With human faces, I have sometimes caught myself doing it unconsciously.) But the beauty of individuals is in those lopsided ears, off-center markings and even charming walleyes.

Some portraits take very few materials...

... and others take lots of colors to capture fur details.