Behind the designs 1: Adventures of a Soft Kitty

Welcome to what will be the first in a series of blog posts looking at the creation process of some of my favourite Lair of the Nerd designs: Adventures of a soft Kitty.

Adventures of a Soft Kitty: Issue One

The cat is named Pippin and is the brother of Newton, the cat who appears on other Lair of the Nerd designs such as Keyboard Cat and Meow

Click through to find out more

Pippin the cat

Here’s a photo of Pippin posing for the camera, a perfect source image for a soft kitty inspired design, in my opinion.

As the design itself was comic-book based I chose a comic book cover for inspiration:

Silver Surfer Issue 1

Silver Surfer premiere issue; I love the old classic comic book styles. More modern comics are awesome but more modern printing techniques mean that we don’t get so much in the way of restrictive palettes on covers any more. Choosing an older comic for inspiration lets me toy with the more classic style of older comics. I’d already decided I wanted to work with a restrictive palette after all.

So with the source material assembled I began working on the design.

The first step was to block out the areas of the cover I wanted to have text on; this text would be the “soft kitty” poem itself:

Cover blocked out

These are simple layers with gradient fills applied and layer effects used to add very simple drop shadows to them. You should be able to see clearly how the classic comic has inspired things here.

Next I added the full poem and used NASA imagery to add Earth to the background:

Adding more to the comic background.

The Earth image was run through a “posterize” filter to reduce the number of colours, and a number of halftone patterns were created and used to create the illusion of clouds in the background but while only using a single colour. The white showing through these clouds would be transparent in the final design, so the selected shirt colour would show through.

Next the task was to create a comic-style version of Pippin based on this photo..

Pippin with dark and light overlays

This involved creating vector shapes for both the lighter and the darker sections of the photo; a lot of personal judgement needs to be used here as there really isn’t an easy way to make shapes that look right without drawing them in manually.

Pippin in the final image has just three colours – these dark and light layers combined with a third shape that is just a silhouette.