Take a pencil and purr

 
Draw A Big Cat

A Lost Cats of Derbyshire activity

With a growl and a snarl, claws flex, a tail twitches and a long lean body pours over the rocks

The big cats are back.

 

A few thousand years after they last prowled the hills of Derbyshire, we’re bringing scimitar-toothed cats, lynx and cave lions back to the Peak District

 

They will arrive as cave lion masks, lynx flags, scimitar puppets. They will hide in shop windows, purr from shadowed corners, smile toothy grins in classrooms….but we started with drawings. With Big cats: big drawings at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery earlier this month, visitors took time to draw. With cats as pictures to inspire us, models to handle and museum exhibits to wonder at; visitors sketched and scribbled, coloured, shaded, smudged and created a renewed world of big cats.

 

We thought you might like to have a go yourselves with the guides we used to help shape those drawings. We used a worksheet with simple suggestions. These follow here but if you’d like to download a copy, use this link for a pdf that should give better quality than the pictures here: Big Cat Drawings worksheet

 

We were working on A2 sheets of paper to give us room for our cats to stretch and started with pencils before sometimes going on to use oil pastels, felt pens and chunky water-colour pencils

 

Faces

Working from a circle for a face-on “I’m looking at you” moment. This way can give quite round faces so you might want to pull those feline cheeks in a bit

 

In profile

Still starting with a circle but now adding a rectangle, we get the strong profile (watch those teeth) of a Homotherium

 

Sitting

A pear shape becomes a cat posed with her front paws neatly placed together. But she might not be smiling so much as waiting….

 

some mammoths snuck in....

Prowling

And then with a stretch and a yawn, our cats can set off on a hunt

 

Simple ideas to get you started…why not have a go, add your own ideas, and send us a photo of your lost cat drawings?

we didn't mind hyenas either

 

Lost Cats is a Buxton Museum and Art Gallery project with Buxton Our Street coordinated by Creeping Toad. Lost Cats is part of the Wild Escape initiative, encouraging people to use museum collections to inspire their own explorations of the world around them

With many thanks to all our Big Cats: Big Drawings artists!

Next event: Big Cat Puppets, Thursday 23rd February 2023