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We'll have a chance to plant this cat on the floor. It looks like it's on a hardwood floor
here, and maybe this is a table leg, or a chair, or something over here. And I wouldn't
put that in, but that's up to you to experiment. I like all the opportunities we have to, again,
show depth, dimension. And even down to the simplest groove in this floor, we have a chance
to have something, again, end. And we can't see it anymore because the cat is blocking
our view. And also we can see how light works. You can see this - maybe I need to get a little
closer here - and look and see that we can use how light works very well here, as it
gets darker and darker as it goes to where there's less light. And also, this brighter
highlight in here is tapering down and getting narrower and narrower, as well, until finally
there's not much of it. But there's still dimension to this groove. So little tiny things
like that that we can do, and putting a drop shadow underneath, and allowing ourselves
to let him be attached to something or be supported by the floor. If you don't put a
drop shadow on this, it would tend to not really communicate what we would like to communicate.
And it's one of the things you'll see me suggesting every so often over on the community; whether
it's a tire to a car, the drop shadow helps attach it to the pavement. The cat, or the
dog, whatever, or the babies, or in a lap, or whatever, this is why I like to be able
to have that drop shadow, and encourage you to really pay attention to how light works
again, because you'll see this gets darker as it goes to where there's less light. And
if you follow those rules, instead of just doing a band or making these shadows all the
same, all the way through, you can also know, by putting this drop shadow on here, that
there is dimension to the cat. And so, when we see more darkness under here, it's because
there's a little bit more separation between the cat and the floor, where this part is
actually just about touching; it's just resting on the floor. So there's very little space
there. There is some, though, and we want to be able to show that. But these are some
of the things that, even if there wasn't a shadow, you might be able to take - on your
own - just the common sense or the logic, and say, 'I want to show there's a little
more dimension. I can see this is curved. I think I'll make a wider shadow there and
not just have it be a band.' So I don't know what your response is, because
I can't see the chat at the same time, but I hope that you'll really enjoy this experience.
And there's a lot of repetition to the cat hairs, but the thing is, it also gives us
practice. It's kind of like the sphere. The sphere is a tedious exercise; there's a lot
of strokes in it. But when you get finished, if you've really been patient, then you have
those tapered strokes that are structured in a certain way. You have a chance to really
embed them in your mind. And your mechanics are going to be much better by this sheer
repetition. And so we're also going to look at the fact that this is really the same as
a human in a lot of ways. There's some things that we will do different, but what is happening
here is your pencil strokes cannot represent the hair, so we're going to have to, again,
create something very similar to what we did with Mulligan man's beard. But we want to
be able to make sure that our minds are reading this as darker recesses in between even the
light hairs. Now, when we get over in the dark, it's exactly
the same thing; it's just a different set of values. And so we want to make sure that
we're showing something deeper in between the hairs, and not have white spaces in between
that are making it look like it's white down in the-- next to the skin. And that's pretty
much the trick of having the successful hair, besides being able to understand how to--
what to draw, how to utilize your brush, and all these things. There's a lot of hair here,
but we can also speed it up quite a bit by using our brush, just like we do for hair
in most instances.