I had recently invested in a mini Wacom Intuos drawing tablet to connect to my Mac in hopes of making the process of creating much faster. Previously I had been painstakingly using my touchpad to trace over my sketches, and then played with the nodes to render the image. This method took absolutely forever and caused me to spend hours on simple graphics. I decided to invest in a drawing tablet instead of a wireless mouse since I am determined to improve my illustration skills digitally, and I also wanted to fulfill my childhood dreams of finally getting one. I always begged my parents to buy me a drawing pad as a little kid as I thought that was what made an artist “professional” and of course I wanted to feel like the real deal.

Wacom tablets definitely have a learning curve when you first begin to use them to draw because you need to get used to drawing without really looking, since the lines are translated onto a screen, so I knew I wanted to practice using it for this upcoming semester. I decided to revisit an old character I had created in my freshman year of college for a project where we had to create a set of phone cases in my Digital Design course with Professor Sue Jenkins. I was so proud of this project when I first created it and thought it would be fun to see how my style had improved. Pictured below is the original style and graphics I had created, with the character second to the left being the one I decided to redraw.

I began with a faint sketch over a random image of a cat in the pose I desired, and got all of the details and anatomy in place. Once I was satisfied with my sketch, I began to start on my linework, and once that was done I added some colors and details to make it more fun to look at. Overall, I was able to create this little drawing super quickly and I like how it came out!