It started — as many things in my studio do — with a cat. Specifically, with my own cat sitting across the room looking deeply philosophical and slightly unimpressed. I thought: that face belongs in my art journal.

So I made a quick pencil sketch. Before the transfer, I took the pencil sketch into Procreate to clean up the lines — nothing complicated, just tidying the wobbly bits and getting a clean, printable outline. That’s actually what becomes the PDF. So if drawing isn’t your thing, no worries — just download the PDF and start from there. Next I grabbed my 12B graphite pencil for a transfer onto a scrap piece of watercolour paper, and spent a very happy afternoon layering colour.

What I used

The materials here are genuinely simple — and that was intentional. Basic watercolours, Derwent pencils for the finer details and linework, and oil-based charcoal for the warm, moody shadows. I was working in my Golden Thread journal, but watercolour paper, a loose sheet, or even card stock all work well. If you scale the PDF to 90% as I did, it fits beautifully on a standard journal page.

The process

The 12B graphite transfer trick is one of my favourites for getting a loose drawing onto a new surface without losing the spontaneous quality of the original sketch. You shade the back of the drawing with the soft pencil, position it face up on your paper, and trace the outline gently — the graphite releases and leaves a soft, paintable line. No tracing paper needed, no fuss. From there, I built up the watercolour in layers: light washes first, then Derwent pencils to add texture and definition, and finally oil-based charcoal for the shadows and that character

The cat outline from this video is available as a free PDF on Ko-fi — just click the link below. Print at 100% for a larger page, or 90% if you’re working in a smaller journal. You can absolutely use your own cat as inspiration instead; mine happened to be available and judgmental. [Ko-fi link]

The video walks through every step — come paint cats with me.