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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.

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