Hey I think you're headed in the right direction but you're very outline/contour focused. You've drawn a straight outline of every form on the kitty. Like on the left side of the cat, which is in light, you drew a straight outline and little spikes to show the texture of the hair. Instead, try to consider each tuft of fur and design your outline from the get go to portray texture.
When drawing texture, the most important thing is the outline/contour of the forms. Consider Uncomfortable's example here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/5/1/fur The outline of your cat should be carefully considered tufts of hair, not scratchy lines. This helps you out because drawing tufts is a lot quicker than drawing little lines as you have.
With texture, less is more. You should challenge yourself to use fewer marks to convey texture. I see you've already done lesson two and your sausage textures show you're building understanding but many of them have the same problem: https://i.imgur.com/mvxQWL9.jpeg Like the bear fur on this page, you've overloaded the sausage with so many marks to show the texture of the fur that the fur is lost. It's super busy to look at and I bet it took forever to draw. Uncomfortable demonstrates that you don't need to use so much.
Last thing, and it's a problem for me too, but draw bigger! Draw as big as you can make yourself do it. Drawing little is less intimidating, but pen and ink techniques like hatching are much easier to control the bigger you draw. It will really help you figure out your proportional issues. Maybe even get a newsprint pad like 18x24, they are cheap af.
Woah, thanks for the insight!
I haven't even thought about the fur like that, I haven't made it to lesson 5 yet, so maybe that would have swayed me in the right direction.
I noticed that the fur on the cat follows a rhythm or a pattern. For example above the eye ridge it curls a bit upwards and laterally, so I waned to portray that. As I was doodling, I finished the dark side of the kitty first, later when I wanted to add the light side, I realized that, that much fur would be overwhelming, but to be honest, I was kind of in the dark whether I should just leave it blank and decided to try to put fur there too but minimize it a bit.
Again, I really appreciate your feedback, especially the part about drawing too much fur.
Cheers!
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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