A silly orange tabby cat sticking their little cat tongue out, how cute! This design is special because it was one of my first serious pieces of vector art made on my tablet in 2021.
I grew up with cats, and come to think of it, our first family cat was an orange tabby cat. All felines are wonderful, and they were definitely some of my first friends growing up. I discovered I had developed a slight allergy to cats when I came back from college! So I haven’t lived with one in a few years, but I still hang with cats when I can.
During the beginning of the pandemic, there was a huge uptick in pet ownership, and I felt that call for a pet companion too. I thought back to some of the cats I had most recently interacted with and remembered laughing the most when I’d catch a glimpse with their little cat tongue sticking out. So I decided to draw a silly orange tabby cat to help cheer myself up, and I hope you enjoy them too!
The Process
This piece was created in a few stages, and I was still testing out different workflows. Part of the challenge was to use free (and open source when possible) software instead of paid options I was accustomed to from college. Up until this point, I had only be creating raster images using Krita which translated to being very similar to painting when using a tablet. For this project, I wanted to make a final product that was vector art instead.
Now if you’re not familiar with the terms, raster images are what we usually interact with digital images files and what digital cameras capture. They are compromised of pixels and when you zoom into them, you see the cube-ish nature to them. In vector art, the image is comprised of shapes that come directly from math instead. So rather than the level of detail being dependent on how many pixels or squares of detail you could capture with raster image, vector graphics can show the same level of detail at whatever size you want it to be because it’s saved as mathematical information instead.
So I started by using Krita to draw out the image keeping the color and line layers separated. Afterwards, I converted them using Inkscape into vector approximation of what I drew. What you see here is the end result after some final tweaks and edits.
Shop “Silly Orange Tabby Cat” art and products on my RedBubble here
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