Artist Statement
The subject of this series is my own orange tabby cat named Goose. Whenever I am with Goose, he inevitably does cute and precious things. With this series, I wanted to put my many phone pictures to use and base illustrations off of them. These particular illustrations explore the different sides of Goose. He has a playful, mischievous side along with a calm, sweet side. I like exploring portraits of animals in particular because there is so much personality within an animal’s face, and I enjoy trying to illustrate this.
Using the reference photos, I started in Adobe Fresco and drew the illustrations on my iPad. The colors were flattened so there are only up to five colors depicting Goose’s fur. I did this by using the eyedropper tool and finalizing the colors from there. The color palette is overall more muted so it can look more realistic. Each background is a flat pastel color. This color choice was so the background color did not overpower the muted colors of Goose’s fur but still added additional color to reflect his playful side. Once the illustration is finished, I pull it into Adobe Illustrator to clean up the edges. The end product is then a vector graphic that can be enlarged to any scale.
