WIP Wednesday

Just a quick post to share what I'm currently trying to finish. It's the end of the school year for my daughter so it's been pretty busy. I dunno, but when I was going to school I don't remember so much fanfare or my mom scrambling to get stuff ready (like goody bags) for my classes but times have changed I guess. Anywho, I've been trying to finish up these fun sassy cats. I envision this as a pattern but I figure you could use the individual cats for different things like a magnet set or in a stripe around a mug.  They are all fleshed out in Illustrator and I'm currently adding more textures and such in Photoshop.  I had fun drawing pen and ink textures to overlay on the flat faces.

Here are the textures I will soon add:

For these I drew with pen and ink and pencil and then scanned in. I then did an auto trace in Illustrator (more time consuming than it's worth I think) and I plan to overlay in Photoshop.  It's something new that I'm trying. I haven't really customized a hand drawn texture to really fit into a certain shape.  Usually I'll just create a pattern or texture and just use a clipping mask in Photoshop which pretty much just cuts it into the shape it's laying on.  We'll see if I like the effect of the texture fitting perfectly onto the shape.

And finally, here is my original sketch.  As you can see there were also "boy" cats with mustaches but I decided to keep the girls with the girls and will do the boys separately later.  I figure for licensing, they don't really mix the gendered stuff when it comes to kids.  Also, I changed some of the "grumpy" looking cats to more "smirky" or happy since I felt that it would be more appealing for kids. I dunno I think the grumpy cats are cute but that's just me. ;)