I had actually been working on a different piece that I was going to talk about for this post, however, I looked up from my tablet to see my cat staring at me from around the corner and was immediately inspired to work on something else based off this!

I wish I was able to get a picture of my inspiration but my cat had immediately scurried off once I noticed him staring at me, but I had a general idea of what I wanted to draw.

A quick thumbnail! Even though this is going to be done digitally, I always find it so much easier to do thumbnails on paper to get my general idea out of my head.

I completely skipped doing line art for this piece, I felt like it would be a fun challenge to only stick to blocking shapes out with colors. It was a really fun exercise because it helps me find areas I could focus better on in the future.

Another thing I did was keeping all the shapes on different layers and using an alpha lock so I could shade without worrying about everything losing its shape. I also have been really enjoying using both a smooth brush for the base colors and using a textured brush on top.

One area I do need to work on more are my values, as I tend to choose colors that don’t have much variety in value and I think one thing that would help is working in greyscale first and then choosing colors (truthfully, I just get too excited to start coloring) but it is great to know what to keep in mind for the future!

(P.S. I promise my next artwork will have a different subject matter not related to cats, I just love cats so much!)

I hope everyones having a lovely summer!

– Esther k.