Hello and welcome to this guide on how to draw cute creatures. I will cover some basics on how to achieve a cute painting of your favorite animal! And I promise I will try to keep it the shortest possible because no one reads long paragraphs of texts, heh.

PART 1 – WHAT IS CUTE?

First things first – let’s take a look on the word itself and its meaning. Cute, according to Google, means „attractive or pretty especially in a childish, youthful, or delicate way“. However, what does that actually mean?

Well, we will look at the childish part the most. Why is that we find animals, mostly little ones, so darn cute? Because they have similar features to human babies; round shapes, big eyes, small nose and full chubby bellies with cheeks. They are a little clumsy and have a dazzling spark in their eyes.

 

Often times, though, that‘s not the only case. Sometimes, a human eye perceives even ugly or weird creatures as cute – take for example an axolotl. This creature doesn’t have many similarities with human babies, however, you can’t argue that they aren’t cute.

 

With this, it is easy to determine what people perceive as cute. The key features are:

• head area as a whole (small, squished)

• small size

• simple familiar shapes (circle, triangle or squares with rounded corners) OR simple lineart

• and, of course, overall feeling of the picture/painting

 

I would argue even kitten pics wouldn’t look so cute if kittens were as big as a horse or if they had extremely small head. And a lot of times the cuteness is in the way the picture is taken. Or in the color scheme and in using basic shapes, when it comes to drawings.

 

So great rule would be to check at least two of these points.

For example, let’s look at a design I did for my school event.

 

A cute little duck, right? But why is it that we find it cute? Because it has two key features:

• The duck is small

• It uses simple lineart and simple shading

With that in mind, we can progress into the next section.

 

PART 2 – REFERENCE?!

Sometimes, you might come across people saying that drawing from a reference is not art. We won’t be really covering this controversial topic, BUT – you can’t get better without practice. And what is the best practice? To practice on something you see around you. And what do you see around you? A tons of things, people and animals.

 

So if you feel bad for using pictures you find online as your only source of reference, don’t be afraid to take a picture of your own pet. Or if you don’t have a pet, ask for a few pictures from your friends or family. There is no shame in using references, since you can argue that even still life drawing is drawing based on reference. Moreover, it helps expanding your creativity in hand with the skills.

PART 3 – SKETCH SKETCH

Firstly, I look at the table of the key elements I should include in my drawing, and choose at least two of them – I will be using cute „face“, small size and the overall feeling of the picture. I want to create that clumsy feeling that little babies are well-known for, as in getting to places they have no business being at.

 

Now that I have this in check, I think of an idea which goes well with my chosen key elements. For this painting, I chose a kitten stuck in a flower pot, with a little daisy on its head.

For sketching, I use real pencil brush in Clip Paint Studio.

I fetch some references, start up my graphic tablet and I can turn into sketching. I start with simple shapes, too – it is overall better for drawing in general to grasp the generic shape of things.

 

Here, I will show you on the sketch:

 

Here is the sketch on its own. But what will happen if we try to find shapes in this?

We will find out that there is multiple of them, with some lines in-between!

Also, don’t be afraid to do multiple sketches before you decide on the one you want to use. You never know which idea you will like better in the end.

 

If it looks bad, don’t feel bad. Drawing takes time and several carpal tunnels to develop. And trust me, one day you will look at your starting paintings and be all nostalgic because you came so far since then. And in the end, the most important thing is to have fun along the way.

So before I chose this sketch, I draw multiple different ideas and little sketches, on some of them I even tried coloring and finishing them. However, I wasn’t satisfied with neither of them, so I started over. And over. And once again, because I didn’t like the lineart. But with this one, I think it might be not so bad, after all.

 

However, sketching something wouldn’t be enough, would it? So let’s take a closer look how I approached my chosen steps:

• Cute face – the kitten has small nose, small mouth and big eyes that are sparking with confusion

• Small – it is so smol it fits into a cup!

• Overall feeling – the kitten is so clumsy it fell into a cup, now it lays on its back with his little paws in the air, trying to get up again

 

Now that we are done with the sketch, we can turn to the second most entertaining part – colouring.

 

PART 4 – COLOURING

For this part, I decided to find a color palette. For this, I like to use site Coolors.co, where you can not only choose an already made palette, but also make one on your own.

 

The colors I chose were these:

 

I decided to choose this color palette because it screams spring. Spring is well-known for Easter, and what are symbols for Easter? Small animal babies. It also has soothing vibe to it and it’s not hard on the eyes, but still has some variety to it.

 

For the flower pot, I will be painting it in the green shades. The kitten will be the orange ones and the flower will be mix of both. For the background, I chose the lightest color of them all.

Now that is off the way, another important step to remember – sometimes it is better to stay minimalistic. What does it mean?

 

My lineart and overall drawing is not heavily complex. Which means – if I matched it with complex realistic shading, it wouldn’t look good. Match complex lineart with complex shading, and simple lineart with simple shading.

 

I also like to use watercolor brush to match with my shading and lineart style.

After changing some details, changing color of the lineart etc., the final picture looks like this.

And as we know from the sketch section, we also managed to cover all the key features we wanted! Yay!

PART 5 – THE END

So this is it! I hope you liked this tutorial and you found out some new things that you didn’t know! Overall, I hope it was helpful and I hope I see you next time.

 

Thank you for reading and have a great day!