Procreate brushes: Syrup (Inking), Tinderbox (Inking)

Total time (approx): 4.5-5 hours

Background

Sometimes I get struck with a vision of something I want to draw, which is typically a gradual accumulation of things I love, values I believe in, and politics I hold. This time it was a vision of a horde of cats (a flock of cats? a murder of cats?) flying in the air, with the words “CATS AGAINST COPS” featured somewhere prominently in the composition. Oh, and also a burning cop car somewhere, I mean how else am I going to drive the point around purr-lice abolition home?

It just made sense to me. I love cats. I am a catless cat person at the moment unfortunately (my roommate is anti-cat), but someday I hope to have one of my own (besides that very brief period in childhood in which I had a cat for maybe about two months before it got hit by a car and died RIP Tigger). BUT ALSO! Fuck cops! Also, I don’t know if you’ve seen that meme floating around about how cats are cool cus they don’t fuck with cops (unlike dogs), but I found it funny and even though I’m sure it was mostly if not completely a joke, the possibility of cats being anti-cop is just one more reason I love cats. So this vision was the perfect mishmash between an appreciation of felines and an abject disgust of state-sanctioned agents of white supremacy and capitalism.

Process

I started out with drawing the burning cop car. This is something I’ve been wanting to draw. Can anyone be a true radical artist if you haven’t managed to capture the iconic burning cop car in your work? And you know what, I’ve been putting it off because it just seems too fucking hard. I only have a couple of years of serious drawing under my belt (with zero formal teaching), and I struggle with dimensions, correct proportions, and basically drawing anything (I guess other than people) super lifelike. So I usually avoid drawing things like cars and fire (and also hands where I can help it, I am so bad at drawing hands, fingers are weirdly complicated!!!). But I do have this masochistic urge to challenge myself at the expense of my own anxieties and fears, so I told myself I’m just going to do my best and be satisfied as long as the end result could be mostly recognized as a burning cop car by the average person, precision be damned.

This is embarrassing but it took me like 2 hours to draw a cop car with flames coming out and around it. I was Googling lots of pictures of cop cars to base my drawing on, which is something I never ever thought up till now that I would ever do in my life. And now I’m never going to do it again, because I copied and pasted the one I drew into a new file so I can just keep using that one graphic over and over again anytime I’m in need of a cop car! Just please don’t look at it too carefully.

The rest of it was less stressful, but yes, time-consuming. I decided I would cut corners with the flying cats and draw really cartoony ones with the same body (with some cosmetic differences in terms of color and width but yeah I was literally copying and pasting from one cat silhouette I made). Most of the cats are just random figments of my imagination, but there are THREE cats based on existing fictional characters included: Princess Carolyn from Bojack Horseman (queen), Bob from the original Animal Crossing games on GameCube (not sure if he’s in later versions but I love him so much and had a huge crush on him as a kid I can’t explain it sorry), and the lucky cat aka the beckoning cat or “maneki-neko” in Japanese (I was today years old when I realized the cat is Japanese in origin, not Chinese).

Last but not least, the background took a while to do, even though I know it looks kind of simple. I always save the background for last because I see it as a way to accentuate what is in the foreground. (I don’t know if this is typical or not, I don’t know any norms when it comes to visual art!) This is the part I wing the most. I just play around and experiment with different colors and patterns and textures until I land on something that feels right. I didn’t want the background to be too plain, as that is not my style, but I also was realizing that having a busy background wasn’t going to work because the foreground was already pretty busy (I mean there’s 10 cats conspiring against the state), so I settled for 3 bright colors segmented into shapes to give the composition some form (look at me talking so artsy, I’m really just saying whatever though hahaha).

Final thoughts

Overall, I’m pretty happy with what I drew. The more I look at it, the more satisfied I am with what I did. (That tends to be the case with a lot of my work tbh.) There’s always a few things that make me go, “Damnit I should have put that there or made that bigger etc. etc.” but as an artist I’ve had learn when to tell that nagging inner voice to STFU. Also, I am really proud of how I drew the cat scratching the hood of the car. Like that is a weird angle of a cat and I think I pulled it off.

Thanks for reading. 🙂