Three Little Kittens

“Three little kittens have lost their mittens…” That was a children’s song/rhyme that sticks in my mind till this very day! By chance, I happened to create another kawaii doodle based on what was in my mind, something reminiscent of my childhood. It was also an opportunity for me to practice and further explore what other fun features are available on the Procreate app!

Same Form, Different Colors

I began with a blank white background and sketched my first kitten, head only this time. First in purple then duplicated it and filled it with a complementary shade of golden yellow. Then duplicated another one and decided to make it a neutral color of grey! Each cat had her separate layer to facilitate repositioning and resizing if necessary. Once I was happy with the positioning, I proceeded in adding shades and highlights to each cat layer with the Clipping Mask as seen in the right-hand photo. I continued keeping the layers separate as you will see why below.

Experimenting with Color Effects

I went back to the Background layer and selected pink as I thought it would be the shade best suited for the color scheme of the cats. Then I added another layer in between background and subjects to doodle in some Retro patterns. And here comes the fun part: adding some funky patterns on the cats too! Working on each cat, I added a Clipping Mask layer and filled the shape in with spray paint flicks. This was then developed by seeing what would happen if I enhanced them with special effects. Good job I maintained the separate layers to enable different effects for each cat! For the yellow kitten I merely “added” more, then with the Grey, “Color Dodge” and then with the Purple a “Hand Mix”. . I have NO idea what they all imply but as I was going through the options I selected what I thought most suitable. Perhaps in future I ought to write about the various effects just to illustrate the differences!

Background Change

Love these sparkly looks on the kittens! Now though I was not sure about the Retro background anymore because I wanted to enhance these sparkles. One of the beauties of digital art is that you can freely alter stuff and, if done correctly, without destroying the other parts of the painting. Here I decided to switch to Storm Bay using a big brush. I love how the transparent blue and yellow works with the rest of the color scheme! And you see how the cats pop out better. And now I’m done! No facial features or even whiskers. I think we should leave it as is to add some mystery to the painting.

The kittens look so fancy and intriguing yet kawaii. Now that I have more time, I will definitely be experimenting more with digital art. The classes with Maurizio de Angelis will still be followed of course. Creating simple abstract artwork is so much fun, especially when featuring cute and whimsical characters like cats. It’s so wonderful finally to be able to get creative again!