This exercise is designed to push me through a deliberate process of stylisation. To Tackle it with an open mind and be prepared to adapt or adopt some of the approaches that I discover.
I begin by drawing a cat which is called Youie and she is my brother in law’s cat. So my ‘real’ drawing as below:
My second drawing using no more than five lines.
Next I made a collage, with blueberries as her head, a butterfly as a ribbon, flowers as her body, raspberries as her front legs, broccoli as her back legs and rosemary as her tail. It’s actually a surreal and a bit chaotic body.
When going to the next step, produce a drawn version (not a tracing) of my collage. When drawing, edit and select from the collage being aware of the properties you want to create a strong character.
I was struggling here because I had no idea how to create an image with fruits, vegetables， flowers or insects. I was thinking about to creating a fruit salad with a cat shape, then to put somebody with this dish on a sunny beach which has a lounger, sun umbrella etc. I did not feel that this was a strong idea. Finally I changed my collage a little bit. I added an orange bikini kit on this cat then use this lazy and relaxing cat shape to create an image of enjoyment on the beach.
A rough sketch，I changed the cats colour so that it has stripes. A relaxing cat with an orange bikini on looks a bit funny. Then next I need to refine it.
In my final picture I changed the colour of the cat to a ginger (Tan) one. This gives more of a sunny feel to the picture. I had introduced the images of playing on the beach giving the impression that the cat is relaxing on holiday. I used a beach ball and gave the cat a drink to increase the impression of relaxing. Maybe the cat is a little drunk.
