Invisible Kitties Part 1! Testing an Idea (+ Update)

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Who's up for a little honesty? This project that I swore I'd commit my free time to at the end of November? This is me starting it now, at the end of January. I've been at work, hosting my dad for Christmas, and falling ill three times. And don't forget the crafting. It's not the festive season without my hand-made decorations. Since November I've also worked on a birthday present for my lovely boyfriend (Dan!) and suffered through a hellish Black Friday weekend. But more importantly... applying for new and exciting opportunities (fingers crossed) and exploring my career options.

See pictured... The painting I made for Dan's birthday. For context, he is a huge Dr Who fan and I love Van Gogh (like every young artist ever) so the Exploding Tardis painting was probably the best birthday present idea anyone's ever had. Maybe that's arrogant but I'm sure he'd agree.

But it's time to focus up again. So now, with my new years resolutions to guilt me away from watching Interior Design Masters... I actually begin animating my own Invisible Kitties. Here's how I started:

My current favourite!

Step 1

I put on some fantastic tunes.

Step 2

I begged and begged my boyfriend for pictures of his family cat for reference. She's an angel and I had to. (I lie, he sent them freely with very little prompting.)

Step 3

I searched through some old art magazines laying around my flat to see if there was anything interesting in terms of pattern or textures. Then I found a lovely painting on a page that had already been torn up, so I have no idea who it was by, and I loved it so I just absolutely had to make a cat from it. No, there's no real logic here, just an idea and a bit of fun.

Side note: let me know if you recognise the painting - even in cat form. I'd love to know who did it.

The lovely cat in question.

Step 4

I got collaging! I used the cat photos as reference for basic shapes and cat anatomy, then I eyeballed cutting out the cat, making sure to layer and try to create a sense of shape and fur with different parts of the painting. (Ignore the PVA, my glue stick ran out literally a day before.)

A very bored, unnamed kitty.

Step 5

Admiring the finished little guy! I had to re-jig it a few times, alter some shapes, layer, but I'm very happy with the final result here, and I do think I want to continue down the collage route for this little animation series. I did initially want to play around with a few different ways of animating my cat, like paper-cut collage, stop motion, and hand-drawn. But coming off the back of my final project at uni ( a collaged film) I was definitely interested in doing this again and I'm glad it worked out and seems to be perfect for this project, too.

So what are my next steps? I'm hoping to get storyboarding (which is one of my favourite parts of animating) and working on creating a final design for the cat... before I throw myself into the set design and actual animating.

Anyway, keep an eye out for more updates and let me know what you think!

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