Learning to Draw

Learning to draw again after 30 years was very humbling. I first bought pencils and paper and engaged a mentor (the wonderful Lorette Broekstra) who told me to draw 100 cats!!! The results were a bit underwhelming. It has been a LONG time since I picked up a pencil

I was not at ALL confident. My hand was SO shaky. I knew I should draw and draw and draw to practice this new skill. But I had so many ideas! I had a story to create!

So I decided to change direction and began to play around with a program I had used for many years, PowerPoint. I merged shapes to create images and embedded textures from Freepik to make them look more interesting. Here are some of my first attempts:

Black and white cat with green eyes

And a small example of the process:

Once I had saved each image as a .png. I could use them to create a scene. For this, I used Affinity Publisher. If the scene required a background, I would again look in FreePik. For instance:

So much fun! I could not stop!

Over the months, my images began to evolve and change. The kind lady got a bit older.

The cats began to take on a more consistent form.

And the original striped furniture morphed into something else.

Two years later, I have thousands of images covering all the different elements of my story. Some I will use. Some I will not. But together, they make up the story of The BiG Meow.

MEOW for now!