Cat’s Eye Illustration

This is another Illustration done with a great iPad App called Sketchbook Pro. I’ve always had a deep fascination with eyes and how to draw them. When I was young, eyes were just an oval with a circle in the middle. Now, when I look at them, they are almost 5th dimension as I stare at them and almost lose myself. Sketchbook Pro makes the challenge of capturing this depth a little easier.  

Creating this Illustration couldn’t be done without the handy layering tool featured in this application. I worked from a reference photo I took of my friend’s cat. First I began with just a light wash to get the form and shape of the subject. On the next layer I added light and shadow – then I merged the two layers. On a new layer I began adding the detail to the eye. By the time I reached Layer 4, I decided I wanted to erase almost all of the white fur to leave a more interesting contour shape. The rest was just adding lots of ‘fur’ strokes – probably one stroke for every dollar of our national debt! I did have to take lots of breaks when drawing the fur – all of those strokes would start to make me crazy. So I would just do one section of fur at a time and come back to it later. This kept the project interesting and fun for me.

In the future, I plan on doing more studies of eyes. I’m not sure what I will end-up doing with them, but they are really satisfying to create and intriguing to look at. If ‘eyes are the windows to your soul’, then success for me would be that when I look at my drawing and actually lose myself in it, just like I do when looking at a real eye