I've gone cat mad.

I am now in my 6th and final week of my internship now and I have realised I have not put anything up on here yet. I have done loads and learned loads so I think it is about time to show you what I've been up to!

I've been a cat lover for a long time. I even did a whole project based on them in my first year of university. I have access to three beautiful cats so I thought it would be a good idea to use them as a subject for some of my illustrations as I can easily take pictures and use them as reference. 

I love to experiment with texture so I thought in  order to combine my love for texture and cats, I was going to create a simple line drawing of one of the cats and use Adobe Photoshop to "fill" in the areas with texture. The textures I will be using will range from photographs or realistic textures to water colour and hand-drawn textures.

This is Gizmo and she is a princess.

She is the youngest of the three cats and by far the most mischievous. Here are some of the outcomes of my tests.

Initial line drawing template I scanned in and perfected in Adobe Photoshop to get the boldest black and white contrast possible. 

Brown crumpled parcel paper texture and water colour texture.

Real fur and metal texture photographs and water colour texture.

Water colour texture test

I think the real fur texture works so well because the direction of the fur is fitting to the contours of the Gizmo's body. I also enjoy the slight abstract feel; although it has been technically constructed through real photographs or fur, the hairs themselves are a lot larger than what they would realistically be on a cat that size.