How to draw a kitten

Six frames, one kitten crouching over a ball of wool. The head and collar first, the ears one at a time after it, and the filled pupils near the end.

This sheet takes one drawing of a kitten crouched low over a ball of wool and shows it six times, each frame carrying everything the frame before it had and adding a little more. By the last frame you have the whole picture. Print it, set it beside your paper, and copy one frame at a time — the point of the six is that you are never asked to draw the whole thing at once.

Frame one is the head, and it arrives more finished than you might expect: the round skull, the muzzle with its whiskers, the small triangular nose, both eyes drawn as complete open rings with lashes above them, the collar band with its little bell hanging from it, and the curve of the back running away to the right with the first part of the tail. What frame one does not have is ears. The top of the head is a plain dome, and it is worth knowing that before you start, because the temptation is to add ears while the head is fresh and then discover they sit at the wrong angle.

The ears come one at a time and late: the right one in frame two, the left one in frame three, and the little inner shapes inside both of them not until frame four. Between them the sheet builds the rest of the body — the tail in frame two, the raised front paw with its toe pads in frame three, a second paw in frame four. If your kitten is going to go wrong anywhere it will be here, because a crouching cat is mostly one soft shape and the paws are what tell a reader it is crouching rather than sitting.

The eyes are worth a sentence of their own, because the sheet does something with them that is easy to describe backwards. The outlines have been on the page since frame one; only the filled black centres are late, and they arrive in frame five. So it is wrong to say the eyes come last and equally wrong to say the face is finished in frame one. The rings are early, the pupils are late, and the gap between them is four frames.

The ball of wool is a bigger part of this drawing than it first looks, and the sheet builds it across four separate frames — a rounded segment in frame two, the frilled upper edge and some strands in frame four, more strands and the beginning of the loose thread in frame five, and the rest of the thread with its little curl in frame six. If you are drawing this with a child, the ball is the forgiving part: nobody can tell you a tangle of wool is the wrong shape.

For proportion, the thing to settle first is the size of the head against the body. Kittens have heads that are enormous relative to their bodies compared with grown cats, and that single ratio does more to make a drawing read as a kitten than any amount of care spent on fur. If your animal is coming out looking like a small adult cat, the head is probably too small rather than the body too big.

The six frames are ordered by which closed shape is largest, biggest first and smallest last. That is an order which is easy to copy from, and it is not a claim that this is how anybody ought to draw a kitten. Plenty of people start with an eye and work outwards, and the finished drawing is the same drawing either way.

The download is one A4 page with all six frames on it, so a class can work from a single sheet each rather than six. It is a plain black outline on white and prints on any printer, including a tired one, because there is no shading anywhere on the page to clog up. Once you have copied it once, the useful next step is to draw the same six frames again with the kitten looking the other way, which forces you to understand the shapes rather than trace them.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026694 words