June Challenge #11

One of the things my 5 year old daughter loves the most in this world are cats. She has two favorites (stuffed animals) but probably close to 20 in her whole collection. I also grew up liking cats and we had quite a few when I grew up. These fancily dressed kitties sort of evolved from the glasses and bow wearing cats in the previous pattern I created.

I think my favorite part of creating these hip kitties was designing their outfits. For these I drew patterns of lines, "x"s and grids in various types of pen, scanned them in and then image traced them in Illustrator. I have a love/hate relationship with image trace. Sometimes it works great, other times it creates more work for me than if I just traced it myself by hand.  This time, thankfully, it worked fine. Oh, I also drew the kitties in black ink (solid shapes) and then image traced them in Illustrator (these proved more problematic and I did a lot of cleaning up).

I really enjoy creating cute characters and illustrations that my daughter would love (and I do too!). I run everything by her and she often provides great feedback. When I showed her these and asked which was her favorite she said "all of them" were.

Here is a close up.