The Style in Question
Laurel Burch painted cats that look like they were decorated by someone who really loved ornaments, textiles, and anything that made an animal look less like a pet and more like a jewel. The cats have elongated, curving bodies. Their tails sweep around in loops. The fur is covered in repeating patterns — paisleys, florals, geometric shapes, stripes, dots. The color palette leans saturated: bright blues, magentas, golds, emeralds. The eyes are large and almond-shaped. There is a decorative collar or harness on almost every cat. What makes her work identifiable isn't just the patterns. It is the posture. The cats are almost always shown in profile, arched back, tail curling up and around, paws planted firmly, as if the animal is strutting rather than sitting. That silhouette alone accounts for maybe sixty percent of the recognition factor. You can change the patterns entirely and the drawing still reads as "Laurel Burch" because of the body language.
How To Draw Laurel Burch Cats
I picked this up after buying some prints at a craft store around 2013 and getting fascinated by how the cats looked like furniture they had animated. I thought it would be easy to copy. It was not. Here is what I learned. The mistake most beginners make is reaching for the decorative details before the cat even exists on the paper. This produces a drawing that looks like a rug with eyes, not a Laurel Burch cat. You need the pose locked down first. Step one: Draw the spine. A single flowing S-curve. The head sits at the top of the S, the tail tip finishes at the bottom, and the legs hang off the middle section. The spine does not go straight. A straight spine kills the character immediately.
Step two: Place the head. Laurel Burch cats have rounded skulls with a slightly flattened muzzle area. The jawline comes up from the neck and meets the forehead in a soft curve, not a sharp angle. The ears are medium-sized and set slightly wide. Not perky like a Siamese. More relaxed, leaning forward about fifteen degrees. Step three: The tail is the most important line in the entire drawing. It leaves the lower back, sweeps up and around, often ending near the cat's nose or chest. It creates a continuous outer shape that wraps the composition. If the tail does not interact with the rest of the body, the drawing looks incomplete. Step four: Legs. Four paws on the ground. The front legs are straight. The back legs angle outward slightly from the body, giving the cat a grounded, proud stance. Paws are small and rounded, almost hidden beneath the belly tuft.
Get the Full Details
Getting the Proportions Right
Her cats have a slightly exaggerated anatomy. The body is longer than a real cat's torso would be, but not cartoonishly so. Think approximately two head-lengths for the main body. The neck is thick and blends into the shoulders without a visible seam. The chest is broad and pushed forward, which is what gives the cat that regal, almost theatrical posture. The eye placement matters more than you might expect. The eyes sit slightly higher on the face than a realistic cat. They take up roughly a third of the face height. This is what makes the cats look both wise and theatrical at the same time.
Building the Patterns
Once the silhouette and proportions are solid, you layer the patterns. This is where the style really lives. The patterns follow the form of the body. They are not random decorations slapped on top. They curve with the belly, wrap around the legs, and flow along the tail in directional ribbons. Paisley shapes are the most common motif. They appear in clusters along the flanks and tail. Each paisley is teardrop-shaped with a curved upper tip, usually filled with smaller dots or spirals inside. Floral elements show up as rosettes and five-petal flowers, often placed near the shoulders and hip areas. They overlap the paisleys slightly, creating depth.
Stripes and dashes run parallel to the spine and tail curve. They create a sense of movement. If your stripes go straight across the body instead of following the curves, the drawing loses its flow. Dots and small circles fill in the negative spaces between larger motifs. They are rarely uniform. Some are solid, some are ring outlines, some are clustered like polka dots on fabric. Geometric accents — triangles, diamonds, chevrons — appear along the legs and collar areas. These are usually placed where the body narrows or turns, acting as visual anchors between the organic shapes.
For the background, she often used complementary solid colors or very simple repeating patterns that do not compete with the cat. Busy backgrounds ruin the effect. The cat should dominate the frame.
Tools I Actually Use
I work digitally now, primarily in Clip Studio Paint. The vector tools there make it much easier to adjust curve paths without redrawing. I sketch the spine and body on a low-opacity layer, then build the final line art on a clean vector layer above it. For patterns, I create repeatable brush strokes and stamp them along the body contours. This takes me about 45 minutes to an hour for a full illustration, compared to the three or four hours it took me when I was doing everything freehand on paper. For traditional work, a 0.3 millimeter fine liner for the outline and alcohol markers for the flat color fills works fine. The markers dry fast and layer reasonably well. I avoid watercolor because the patterns demand sharp edges and the water tends to bleed into areas you do not want colored. One practical problem I ran into that I did not expect: when working digitally and using the stamp tool for pattern repetition, the patterns lose their directional flow if the canvas rotation changes unexpectedly. I was working at a slight angle to get the tail curve right, rotated the canvas, stamped a row of paisleys, and they all ended up pointing the wrong way relative to the body surface. The fix was straightforward — I locked the stamp orientation to the canvas axis before stamping, not to the drawing. It took me two failed attempts to realize that was the issue. Now I check that setting first thing.
Common Pitfalls
Pitting too much detail in the face. The face should stay relatively clean. Two eyes, a small nose, a few whisker lines, and maybe a delicate collar element. Everything else on the body handles the visual weight. Over-decorating the face makes the cat look confused rather than dignified. Making the tail too thin. The tail needs to read as a substantial ribbon, not a string. Start it thick at the base and keep it relatively consistent in width until the final curve. If it tapers to a needle point, the elegant loop effect is lost. Using too many colors. Her palette is rich but controlled. Pick a base color, an accent color, and a secondary pattern color. That is three colors maximum for the main body. Background and small details can introduce one or two more, but adding five or six body colors muddies the design and makes it look cluttered rather than ornate.
Drawing the cats sitting normally. If the cat is sitting in a conventional pose with the tail wrapped around the paws, it will not look like a Laurel Burch cat. The signature standing or prancing pose is essential to the style. You can vary it slightly — a seated pose with an exaggerated arched back and tail curl still works — but a standard sitting cat does not carry the aesthetic.
What This Approach Does Not Do Well
Let me be clear about the limitations. The Laurel Burch style is highly decorative and graphic. It does not translate to realistic illustration. If you need anatomical accuracy for a veterinary pamphlet or a wildlife documentary, this style is actively wrong for that purpose. The elongated body, exaggerated proportions, and heavy patterning obscure the actual musculature and skeletal structure of a cat. Attempting to hybridize it with realism produces something that looks inconsistent rather than intentional. The style also does not age well in certain applications. Because it relies heavily on saturated color blocking and bold patterns, reproducing it in black and white print or low-resolution web formats strips away most of the visual information and leaves just a confusing arrangement of shapes. If you need to work in monochrome or low-res, simplify the pattern density significantly or switch to a different illustrative approach entirely. For people who want to learn this style, I would recommend starting with tracing the major poses from existing Laurel Burch prints to internalize the body language before attempting original compositions. The pose vocabulary is surprisingly limited — maybe eight or ten distinct stances she repeated across her career. Once you have those memorized, the variation comes from the patterns and colors, which are far easier to generate spontaneously.
The original prints and books by Laurel Burch herself, particularly Wishing On a Star and Cats, are still the best reference material available. She published several large-format illustration books in the 1990s that show the work at a size and resolution that makes studying the line work and color choices genuinely useful. Cheap reprint editions compress the images enough that the brushwork details become useless for learning purposes.
