How to Draw a Cat Step by Step

Four numbered steps run down the left of this page, and the rest of it is one big dashed paper. Step 1 is the cat's outline on its own, drawn in orange; in steps 2 and 3 the earlier lines are black and the new lines are orange, so a child can see exactly what is added each time; step 4 shows the finished cat. The steps are cut from the drawing itself, not redrawn, which is why the cat on the card and the cat the child is aiming for are the same cat. This is the base page of the how-to-draw family for kindergarten.

Drawing from steps teaches a child to see a whole animal as an outline plus parts added in order, which is how confident drawers work and the opposite of starting with an eye and running out of room. Keeping the child's drawing on a large paper beside the small steps also trains looking from a model to a page, a skill that writing will need.

Print it on plain paper and give the child a pencil; nothing else is needed, and there is no answer to mark because the drawing is the child's own. The family's ten other pages change one thing each: dotted shapes to start from, a grey cat-sized model to trace, an unfinished copy to complete, a grid, a word to write, a scene, mixed-up steps, a box for every step, three sentences, and drawing from memory. The child draws the animal from its own steps; tracing letters, grid-copy pixels and symmetry drawing have their own pages.