What makes an animal cute?

Hello! My name is Victoria, and today I want to show you all how to draw cute animals ! I'm going to go over all the ways you can design your own character , make it look cute and all the steps you need to take to draw your own lovable friend. Let's get started!

 

In this tutorial we will cover:

-Defining characteristics of cuteness

• Stylization from refrence

• The process of making a character - Sketching, outlining , coloring

 

What are the features that makes our pets cute?

Have you ever wondered what is it that makes us go “Aww“ at our pets ? When we look at them , there are certain features that we as a whole consider adorable. But what are those features? Let's take a look.

 

Features that make an animal cute :

-Squished rounded body with a big head

• Big eyes , usually further apart

-Short legs

-Small snout and mouth

 

Now , that we know what exactly makes an animal cute We can implement those things in our own drawing.

Choosing a refrence - understanding shapes and form

One of the most important things - the first step is choosing a refrence . First, we need to know how the animal looks like before we start to stylize it. For the sake of this tutorial, I drew our the animal of my choice - chinchilla- but you can choose a photo refrence . Rather than looking at all the details look at the general shape first - there you will find one big circle , triangle, square oval shape . It all depends on the animal you are drawing.

Sketch

After we put down the basic shape of the animal we can start building onto it. It doesn't have to be extremely detailed, rather try to keep it simple . Stick to the refrence for the most part but don't be afraid to put your own touch to it ! Sketch out the head add big eyes with white dots in them , nose , legs, ears , face and tail - you can also add fur but don't overdo it , the animal should have a clear silhouette.

Lineart

When your sketch is done , you can start outlining it. I chose to outline it with with the brush “chalk“but you can choose any brush.This is a good time to define the face and you can also add little strands of fur .Your lineart layer should be on top of your sketch layer.

Picking your color palette

This is a step i consider to be fairly important. When coloring alot of people would choose to color pick from the photo, however when drawing stylized, cute animals we aren't striving for realism- which means we can use less colors to make the drawing more clear to the eye. You can pick the base coat , eye color and ear color .I reccomend using more toned down , even pastel colors.

Color

Now, for the actual coloring . Once we have our color palette ready we can start to color our character in . Under the Lineart layer we need to make a new layer - that one will be for Coloring (the base color) and on top of that layer we will make another one which will be a Clipping mask (this one is used for shading , rendering , details etc .)

 

To fill in the color in the lineart we can either use the bucket tool or the Auto select wand. When coloring feel free to play around with various textures for the fur !- for an example i used a mixture of a watercolor brush and charcoal brush for the fur.

Once the lineart is filled in with color we can start shading on the clipping mask. (you can use multiply , color burn to elevate the look)

-One small detail - you can also color in the Lineart simply by putting another layer above it using a clipping mask and coloring in with your desired color.

And that's it ! You have your own cute character. You can use this technique and steps to create many more like these below.

 

You can also use this technique for less traditionally cute animals , anything is possible!

Conclusion

Congratulations for getting this far in , and I hope this was helpful to you all and that you learned something new ! Thank you for following my tutorial ♡