When I came to tackling this topic I felt like I wanted to do something a bit geometric. While I initially planned to draw it by hand on paper, I found constructing the shapes in Paintshop worked a lot better. I also discarded the idea of colour, in favour of pure black and white (closer to how cats see things :)).

As I worked on this I remembered the cat illustrator/cartoonist, Louis Wain, who succumbed to schizophrenia (as it was then called), and whose mental illness was reflected in his increasingly abstract work - there's a Gallery here that shows a range of his work, but not from the far end, when the cats had nearly disappeared amid swirls of colour. From what I remember, Wain lived with a sister who had a lot of cats, and was rediscovered after many years of living in an Asylum, by someone who recognised the pictures he was working on. Sadly, he's probably most known these days by students studying psychology, but his work is well worth discovering.

I thought about scanning some sketches of the cats we used to have in addition to the cat design picture I've posted, but maybe some other day...

Labels: Illustration Friday