Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Square Kats

I started playing around with some ideas for kitty kats, and these little guys were totally ready to slink out the end of my pencil. They were easy for me to love right away, which isn't easy for me to do. I'm usually pretty critical of my initial sketches for a project.

Here's the sketch of all the kats in a row:


The first thing I could see them on was across the chest of a t-shirt. Your grandma's. Wouldn't she look cute in that? In a Rotty Kat t-shirt? I wonder if she would notice they were Rots.

I'm thinking of all kinds of katty variations: on t-shirts without a background; on note cards with a background; a single kat on the back of an iPad case. Depending on how they turn out in color, I'm thinking these kitties could be exploited for quite a long time.

They're already ticked, so why not?

Friday, September 09, 2011

Sharky's Café

My napkin @ Sharky's Café, 3960 Rt 30, Latrobe PA.

Somebody else's sketchbook book

Gris Grimly (one of my favorite illustrators) decided to publish a book totally full of sketches he's made over a 13-year period. (Which 13-year period, I really don't know.) It's called Gris Grimly's Atrum Secretum: 13 Years of Hidden Truths, and will be available on Amazon October 1.

The book is beautiful, inspiring and discouraging all at once. Some of what he considers sketches I wouldn't be able to do on my best day. They make me want to do better at the same time they're punching me in the face and screaming there's really no hope.

Except for a title page, one end page explaining about the book, and copyright info just inside the end paper, the book is all about the sketches. The only text in the book was written when the sketches were drawn, so pages aren't filled with insight and analysis or whatever filler usually invades books like this.
 
I bought my copy directly from Gris, so mine is a little different than the one available on Amazon. (Mine looks like the one above.) In mine, he drew an original sketch on one of the pages before he sent it out (image to the right) and included a signed and numbered sketch coupon "certificate" to authenticate the drawing as original.