This was a few weeks ago but, upon my grocery shopping trip by the supermarket, who appears on the doorstep? A cute little cat of course! As stray cats are uncommon in the Netherlands, she must have belonged to someone and decided to wander around the neighborhood and ended up by Albert Heijn, a Dutch supermarket chain. And there she was pacing up and down, pausing by the automatic entry doors to have a peek inside. All the passer-by’s smiled and walked past her but I decided to play with her! And so I squatted down and began chatting to her in Japanese, completely oblivious to my surroundings and even managed to block the entrance! But no one complained, they all were quite amused and a few even pitched in to give her some TLC. And of course, I had to “document” this in my drawing!
Pencil Sketch
And how about some digital art for this? A great practice to work on some texture brushes again, especially for fur. On the iPad I firstly sketched my outline with the Procreate Pencil. It was still not quite warm though sunny so I still had my wooly hat on with pom pom “ears”. Another good practice is drawing the cat in a sitting on all fours position which I managed. And for fun, a caption “meow!
Coloring it all In
I went for my customary Medium Air Brush for coloring my drawing in. It gives an even opaque coverage and wonderful for illustrations. First I began with the background, assigning separate layers for the ground and sky. Then the sun followed by the characters, once again with separate layers for each object or where applicable for each shape. At this stage I already started experimenting a bit with textures with the hair and the cat’s fur (Fur 04 from Eldar Zakirov’s Fur brushes) and eyes (Light pen in neon green from the Lights brushes). Looking great so far!
Textures and Patterns
And here a further opportunity to play around with different brushes available! Seeing the fur brush worked well for the cat (though more practice needed), I was excited to try other brushes in the Fur range on my woolen hat. First Fur 19 on the hat, followed by Fur 6 on the pom poms, two different wooly textures. The pom pom came out rather well, I must say and I’ll certainly be keeping that in mind in future. With clipping mask, some Tiger Patterns were then incorporated on my outfit with Soft Light mode. And then Glitter Fill on the eyelashes from the Gold Rush set. I did experiment a bit with the textures for the background but couldn’t come to something I liked and not wanting to make the painting look too busy, I decided to skip it and focus on the subjects more. And here we are now!
Another fun experiment with digital painting! Although I am more strictly an analog artist and prefer the hands-on approach to tangible mediums like paint and ink on paper and canvas, digital is also a good change if you’re feeling too “lazy” to fetch all your stuff and getting messy. This painting gave me further practice with textures and light, and I definitely can develop creatively. And now, I’m very pleased with how kawaii my work turned out here. Hope to see that cute kitty again soon too so I can paint about her more!
My Kawaii Quarter 