Painter Haru Otomi always starts with the eyes when he draws cats. His amazingly life-like pictures rendered with colored pencils include felines with mesmerizing eyes. Otomi, 22, is a college student whose real name is Haruki Kudo (Otomi is his name as an artist). He said his drawings are the product of fear that he could lose his eyesight given his physical condition. Since birth, Otomi has had almost no vision in his right eye because of eye cancer.Cherishing his eyes means he pays special attention to the eyes of cats in his drawings. Otomi draws the eyes first because he pours all his energy into them. Working on cat drawings, Otomi creates their eyes to look as shiny as marbles.

He carefully draws the lightly colored eyes on special paper.Otomi relies on colored pencils in as many as 120 hues from the Polychromos line from German stationery maker Faber-Castell. He chose Faber-Castell after trying more than 10 brands from multiple manufacturers. "The pencils' lead is hard but easier to apply to paper," said Otomi. "Color irregularities emerge less often, too." Otomi spends four hours a day on a drawing so that a drawing can be completed in a week. Some drawings, however, can take longer than six months. Otomi has done colored pencil drawings for more than five years while polishing up his sketching techniques at Tohoku Seikatsu Bunka University's faculty of art in Sendai.

He graduated in March 2023. He is determined to carve out a livelihood as a freelance artist in Yamagata.