How To Draw Cats

By now, everyone has realized what the internet is really for. No, it’s not porn. The internet is for cats.

On a personal level, I am for cats. And not in some PETA get-naked-for-the-good-of-beef way, but because I have cats to thank for giving me my start as an artist.

Long ago, in the third grade, I was in library class (remember when there was an entire class, just to visit the library? Don’t get me started on nap time) perusing the art section. I knew I had a knack for drawing. Just before in art class, we were learning about complementary colors as Ms. Greenberg instructed us to color in the juiciest red apple we could. Finding out that adding green to my red apple makes the shadows look like black pretty much blew my mind. What other crazy secrets did the art world hold? And how could I maximize them to fit my eight-year-old interests? If the library couldn’t tell me, no one could.

This is how I came to find the How To Draw series. If I only read this book, I could draw real mountains! Real cars! Real bank notes! I could draw anything, it seemed. I picked up the Animals book and flipped forward to the section on cats. There she was: the cutest, most cuddliest, most adorablest kitten in the world. Lisa Frank had nothing on this kitty. I had to have her, but I didn’t have enough time before the end of class to check the book out, let alone learn to draw the Best Kitten in the World™, so I did something terrible. Blasphemous, in my mind. No, I didn’t rip the page out. I traced it.

I felt dirty. This wasn’t how I should’ve drawn my pet to life. I created a monster. Oh, she was cute alright, but in my heart, I knew I was holding an android. (It would be years later til I learned to accept androids, clones, tracings, samples, and other iteratious concepts.) I went back to class with a heavy secret in my pocket.

Teacher’s Pet

Miss Bryceland’s class was my best elementary school memory. To me, she was the most creative, awesome, thoughtful, and caring teacher I’d ever had. To learn our times tables, we were told to make up songs (or raps, if we preferred) involving each row of numbers. (To this day, I think of the times tables as music.) We got actual gold stars if we completed a book, and the person with the most books read each week would get a prize. She had a pet ferret that she brought in one day, who she also drew into our little certificates we got for various accomplishments. To help learn about racism, we played the “brown eyes only” exercise, where brown-eyed kids could drink from the fountain, use the coat racks, and pick the nicest textbooks, while the blue-eyed kids had to wait or forgo these amenities completely. My heart broke for her when she revealed that the man in the photo on her desk was her late fiancé, killed in a car crash because he was slumped behind his seat belt. I can still hear her telling us to always sit properly in cars, because she wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone else.

And above all this, she had a system of ticket rewards for good behavior and participation. If you answered a question well, you’d write your name on a ticket you got. At the end of the day, you put all your tickets into a jar, and at the end of the week, she pulled out a name to collect a prize. Which was usually a bright-colored Bic pen. (I coveted the purple one. Come to think of it, Bryceland created plenty of incentives for us to participate in her class. Smart woman, predictable kids.) I tried my hardest to get enough tickets in the jar, but she was pretty fair in targeting most of us equally so we all had a good shot.

The Class Shrimp

Now, there was a new kid that year. Most of us had grown up together since kindergarten, so this kid had spent the past four years without us, therefore he was weird. Well, I didn’t want to label him like the others did, but he really was weird. He tried to be the clown so he could make friends, but that backfired because his tactics usually pissed everyone off. His name was Giacomo, and he teased me like I was his worst enemy. Or maybe he liked me. But I know he called me shrimp so many times that I went home and cried. Why was I the smallest kid in class? How come he didn’t call the other short girl a shrimp? It’s not my fault! He pointed out everything I did like it was so glaringly stupid, and sometimes people played along.

One day, he was oddly quiet. I was starting to think he grew a pair of sense-making lobes. During one of our breaks, Miss Bryceland called me up to her desk. Did I win a crystal pen? Holy crap, I won a crystal pen! My dreams of drawing purple kittens across the sky became so real I could cry. And then I almost did cry.

“Emily, what is this? I found it in the ticket jar,” she said, holding the little scrap of paper I had traced my kitten onto.

My heart, it went thud. “I.. it’s my kitten drawing. I didn’t put it in there. I didn’t even know it was missing!”

“Well, here you go.” She gave it to me, as if it were no big deal. I was confused. Why did she have my kitten? In the ticket jar? As I walked back to my desk, I heard a familiar chuckle.

“So you found my kitten!” said Giacomo. My face filled with blood as my brain thought evil, furious thoughts.

“You did this?! You put my drawing in the jar? Why!”

“Because you like the stupid thing so much, I thought you should show it to her.”

“I can’t believe you! Just.. never touch my stuff again. Go away.” He chuckled again and went off to the other side of the room. Still livid, I did the only thing I thought I could do. I told on him. “Miss Bryceland, Giacomo was the one to put my drawing in your jar.”

“Oh.” Really, she should’ve said “And what do you want me to do about it?” or “Dumb luck, kid” or “You’re bothering me with this shit?” or even “That’s nice.” Either of those would’ve been less of a letdown than her simple “Oh.” I don’t remember the rest of that exchange, but I do remember learning an important lesson: never trace anything ever again or some kid will find out and try to ruin you by making you look stupid and you can’t be predictable and you have to learn how to draw some fucking cats on your own just do it already.

Ever since then, I practiced drawing cats, horses, ducks, computers, and myriad other things in the world. Without the help of books. I tried and tried and tried. The drawings were horrible, but I knew I couldn’t get better if I didn’t keep trying. Eventually I fell in love with anime, Sailor Moon specifically, and drew endless Japanese-style girls in sailor outfits with astrological themes and talking cats.

And you bet your ass my cat drawings were fucking awesome.