Creating the Cat Alphabet

Recently, I spent some time combining two things I enjoy – pets and typography.  I know people like learning how things are made, so I thought I’d walk you through the process of creating a Cat Alphabet. Maybe you can help me profit from it. : )

The project started without much thought. I like drawing and having been using my cats as models for some time now. They are willing and able, and the bone structure of humans and other animals match up quite nicely. We all have ankles, knees, elbows, etc. You just have to get the proportions right for the animal you are drawing.

I decided to see how cats would fit into the various letters of the alphabet. I’ve been a fan of the alphabet since an early age, and started my life in graphic arts with hand-lettered posters in college.

The first step was to draw the letters of the alphabet, all roughly the same size, blocked out. That was the easy part.

Next was adding the cats. Some letters gave me specific ideas, but most were inspired by the shapes available to work with, and what a cat might do if it found itself confronted with such a shape.

At the end, I had a pretty neat hand-drawn cat alphabet. It looked pretty good. Maybe I should make a book or something, I thought. If so, they’d need to look much better.

These were all done in pencil. I considered inking them all, but wanted to preserve the rougher lines. I opted to scan them in as pencil, then do some clean-up on each.

I scanned each one at a resolution good enough for most print circumstances. I then made copies to work on.

I used Photoshop to adjust the image levels, making the blacks blacker and whites whiter.  I decided to re-do each of the letters with crisp, clean lines, so I used the originals as a guide, then erased them. This isolated the cats on one layer, and gave me my solid color shape for each letter.

In truth, the letters were all solid black for a while. Later I decided to divide the rainbow into 26 and colored each.

For each cat, then, I got rid of stray lines, specks, and smudges I didn’t want. In one or two places, I added a line to make things more clear. I tried to keep the roughness of the pencil originals while cleaning things up and making them more clear.

For a long time I was working with a black and white cat with a colored letter behind it. I like black and white. I get it. Color is tougher for me. I had the rainbow of letters, but I would need to color the cats. I got over my fear, embraced the knowledge that I had an undo button, and started digitally painting.

I put the colors on their own layer, as not to mess up what had already been done and to make it easy to replace if I failed. My fears were unjustified, of course. It wasn’t that hard to match cat colors with the letters they were sharing. In the end, I was pleased with the result.

At this point, each letter was complete. On average they took 2-3 hours each to finish.

So what do I do with it? I decided to see how it looked printed, and created a poster sized image file containing all 26 letters in order. I sent it to Lotus and had one printed. It was gorgeous. The folks at the counter liked it.

I got a few more printed and gave them to family (and one to the Windham County Humane Society) over the holidays. Everyone liked their poster.

So, what can I do with this? The artwork all sat around for most of the spring, and I’m not really in a position to become a person who has stacks of posters and mailing tubes around the house. I do think the artwork is appealing, possibly to quite a few people.

For the short term, I’ve decided to put it all on cards, posters, t-shirts, and mugs at www.zazzle.com/grotkeart

This gets the artwork out there in a place where people can enjoy it on a wide variety of useful items, until I can find a better business model. : )

The marketing plan for now is to experiment with networks of people telling one another about this. You can help. If you know a vet, animal rescue person, teacher of alphabets, or cat lover who might enjoy this, tell them about it. And ask that they tell people they know. Activate sharing!

The link again is www.zazzle.com/grotkeart . Be sure to note that zazzle let’s you do a fair amount of customization of sizes, styles, and so on. The 78 products listed are just starting points, so to speak.

And yes, dog lovers, I am working on a dog version.