Skip to main content

Cats Drawn by TET - Age 11

Original Cat Art by TET,
Age 11. Pen and Pastel.
On my recent trip back to Perth, Western Australia, I visited my Aunt, who asked me if I wanted some pictures back that I had drawn her as a gift when I was just eleven years old.

The drawings were too big to fit on my scanner so I decided to just show you a sample from two of the best that my Aunt gave me.

The first image on the right is one half of a drawing with two cats in similar poses. I wanted to show this image because, if memory serves me correctly, it's a cat that I drew with very few references for the pose or even the structure of the cat's body.

That said I had been drawing and copying a lot of pictures of cats prior to this, so it's not as if I'd never drawn a cat before.

The second image is one from a larger page of many cats I drew prior to drawing the one above. You may notice a dramatic difference in the quality of the drawing.

Cat Art by TET, Age 11. Copied from a children's book.
Pen and Colour Pencil.
The reason for the quality difference between this and the first image is that this whole page of cats were all copied from a children's book of cats I'd gotten hold of. Obviously, at age eleven, it was relatively easier for me to reproduce someone else's art than to produce this kind of quality in an original drawing.

I would like to stress that the image wasn't traced, as evidenced by the fact that the central striped cat has a slightly lop sided head, where I didn't compensate properly for the angle I was drawing at. I also tried to match the colour scheme of my reference image as well.

Some artists are embarrassed to show their earlier art. I'm not one of them. Seeing my really early work is always an interesting reminder of just how far I've come. Apart from that I hope other aspiring artists find it interesting to see how I started out.

Along with my own original drawings I did a heck of a lot of copying of other artists work in my youth. It taught me a lot about drawing and helped me to advance my own style without me really even thinking about it.

In fact it wasn't until I started networking with other professional artists that I realized finding your own style was actually a thing that concerned them. I just drew things how I do, like I always have and people started to say I had my own unique style.

So, just to finish up this post, here's one of my recent cat artworks for comparison.

JAC's Back by TET.
Acrylic on Canvas.

TET Life Topics:

Comments

  1. Mum60June 06, 2013 8:29 PM

    I haven't seen either of these drawings, but I wasn't around so it's not surprising. I liked copying pictures from books when I was school age. I used to copy line for line, and get it almost exactly how it was in the book.

    I've got a horse I drew jumping over a gate done this way from a children's nursery rhyme book, and it was all done just by the light of the black and white TV back in the early 60s, as we used to put the light out to view, and there was no such thing as a lamp at our house. Bad for the eyes really, but not really known then. Only thing to critize about the horse was that the head looked more like a cart horse's head, as the nose was too short, but still a good drawing of a horse's head.

    I copied cartoons this way from the newspaper, and did a big one of Andy Capp, plus some small strips as well. I put them up on the message board in our shabby tea room at work in my first job at 15yrs at a fashion shop to learn to do window dressing. I never took them with me when I left after 2yrs to go to work just next door at another fashion shop. They were just about exact replicas.

    I think I've mentioned before about people at school in art class at secondary school (equivalent to high school here) asking me to draw things for them, such as a witch or flames on a bonfire (they did scribble) and then I'd get told off for not finishing my picture!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TET (David Arandle)June 07, 2013 4:33 PM

      I'm pretty sure you have seen these, you just don't remember them. Not that I'd expect you to remember them since I'd forgotten about them until Auntie Margaret showed them to me. Both were drawn in July of 1981.

      You could get back into drawing if you wanted to. I know many people who stopped drawing once they started a family but have taken it up again since retiring. Quite a few are doing really well since they got back into art too.

      Delete
  2. Mum60June 08, 2013 6:55 PM

    I'm sure I would have remembered them. I would have thought your Auntie Margaret would have wanted to keep them, or most of them anyway, depending on how many there were.

    It would be nice to do drawing again, I preferred it to painting, but I'd be rusty now. I think I've got enough with my writing though, as it takes me all my time to do that. Supposed to have a set day for doing it, or half a day ie: Monday maybe once a month, as I go out on the second Monday of each month for a lunch meeting with some ladies.

    Doesn't always work though, you have to be strict. I usually end up just squeezing it in at the last minute. Next Showcase is due out in July and I've got two articles in that this time which is what I usually aim for but didn't manage it last time. Last Friday was the first time I'd read anything out for weeks!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Gifts and Apparel featuring art by TET.

Popular posts from this blog

Movie Review: Superman (2025) *No Spoilers*

T he one thing I like about James Gunn as a comic book movie director is that he leans into the comic book nature of the world and the characters.  He's not trying to do a realistic take on any of the characters. He's simply bringing the comics to life. It's still his take on the characters, but he doesn't shy away from their comic book origins. James Gunn's  Superman  is very much a comic book movie in every sense. Nothing is off the table because it's too 'comic-booky' and might look silly in a live action film.  To me that's incredibly liberating. It lets James actually tell a proper Superman story that isn't hamstrung by reality, or tip toeing into the fantastical just enough to allow Superman to exist in the real world. Superman begins in the middle of a battle. Metropolis is under attack by a super powered being known as 'Hammer of Boravia', however everything is not as it seems, and Superman (David Corenswet) must work with other s...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices.  My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe?  Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...
3 comments
Continue Reading »

Movie Review: A Complete Unknown (2024) *No Spoilers*

Y ou would think the Bob Dylan story would be 'wind-swept and interesting,' to quote Billy Connelly, however, despite  A Complete Unknown  being quite an engaging film, it feels like it missed the years that really shaped him as a song writer/performer. The film starts in 1961, with a then unknown, 19-year-old Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arriving in New York City with his guitar.  From there he forges relationships with musical icons on his meteoric rise, culminating in a groundbreaking performance that reverberates around the world. The problem being, according to this film, Dylan arrived in New York, for the most part, fully formed as a folk singer/song writer. In virtually no time he makes a very important connection that puts him on the trajectory of doing the work and becoming a name, before making his world changing performance. While there is some drama behind the scenes with his various relationships, none of it is particularly unique to any number of up and com...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

TV Series Review: Humans (2015-2018, 3 Seasons) *No Spoilers*

Colin Morgan, Katherine Parkinson, Ivanno Jeremiah, Gemma Chan, and Emily Berrington in Humans (2015) W hile it may seem late to be reviewing Humans now, nearly seven years after the show wrapped, the only thing that's really aged about it is the opening titles... and even then, not that much. I think I caught the first season on Netflix back in 2015, and then kind of dropped off waiting for a new season to appear. As of writing this, all three seasons are on Amazon Prime. Humans is set in a parallel world that looks much like ours except humanoid robot helpers, that look just like real humans, called 'Synths', are now common place. Season one begins at the point where the first synths go from being subservient machines to gaining consciousness, and explores not only how humanity reacts to that but how the synths react to humanity's perceptions as well. Initially it follows a group of OG synths, already given consciousness by their creator, and just trying to survive i...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Australian Federal Election 2025 - World's Most Boring Government Re-elected by Landside - We're Even More Fine!

Anthony Albanese Victory by ChatGPT and TET. W hen I started writing about the 2025 Federal election the polls were suggesting the world's most boring government was crusing to a defeat . As it turns out, boring is good, and Australia wants more of it, handing the current government a landslide win with a majority vote. Anthony Albanese became the first PM since John Howard to win a consecutive term, and the first Labor PM since Bob Hawke to do so. Some of that comes down to the leadership revolving door both major parties had through the mid 2000s. Although Anthony is my preferred PM over Dutton the irony is Dutton sounds more like a leader with a fairly commanding voice and an ability to speak well, without sounding like he's waffling and dodging questions, even if he is. Anthony, on the other hand, does have the ability (and speech writer) to say a lot of inspiring things but it gets lost in the delivery. He doesn't seem to know when to emphasise a point for effect. In h...
2 comments
Continue Reading »

James Gunn's Social Media Monkeys Joke Was a Highlight of His Superman Movie For Me

B efore James Gunn's Superman Movie was released there was a whole rumor going around that the movie would feature monkeys on computers trolling Superman's social media, sparking much outrage. #supersh*t. I didn't know this was even a thing until just prior to writing this article. I did a search to see if anyone had posted a clip of the monkeys scene from the movie and got pages of discourse featuring videos and articles prior to the film. Most of it from Gunn detractors (let's say) seeing it as some kind of childish swipe at them... well not them specifically but, you know, those other people who have every right to hate on anything sight unseen. Anyway, I'm not going to give even one such example a link or air because it's kind of sad watching someone devote so much commentary to a throw away gag that is absolutely a nod to James Gunn's Superman trolls.  The whole reason this post exists, is to say I loved the joke, because fourteen years ago, and I...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Episode 9, and 10 - Shuv-it Revelation and Did I Improve?

T he final two episodes of my ten part YouTube series documenting my process of learning the first seven basic skateboard tricks from Braille Skateboarding's, Skateboarding Made Simple. These are the links to  Episode One ,  Episode Two ,  Three to Five , and Six to Eight , should you feel the need to see where I started or you want a bit more background on my personal skateboarding journey that began in 1988. I won't ramble on in this final introduction to my last two sessions, other that to say, episode ten is the highlight in terms of getting a direct comparison from episode 1 with side by side footage. Episode 9 - Frontside Pop Shuv-it Revelation The only episode not filmed on the second Sunday, thankfully due to the weather raining Sunday out and not my lack of willingness to continue. Monday was also very rainy but I managed to fit my session in during a small window of no rain late in the day. It was a little bit of a difficult session in that I could only uti...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »