A Cat on a Moon for Halloween

My daughter is growing up, and I have been instructed that I am not to accompany her guising for Halloween as she will be going with her friend.  This is both a happy and sad moment - it is wonderful as it is a sign of her growing independence - but it pains me as it means that special stage of life and annual ritual of guising round the neighbours has passed (see previous blog posts here, here and here...).  To cheer myself up, I decided to create a Halloween design and use it as an excuse to go and see all our friends in our neighbourhood and hand deliver them!

As I shared recently, I've been experimenting with creating textures on lasercut woodcuts.  I immediately knew I wanted to apply this technique to a Halloween card, using this design as a composition.  I have been drawing a lot of cats recently (especially British Shorthair Cats, they are ridiculously cute!), so it was easy to come up with this design.  I then translated it as an outline using my tablet, using the Ramen Pen from Retro Supplies.  I really enjoy using this digital option on my Samsung Tablet, linked up to my laptop while using Photoshop Elements.  

After my experiments, with using the 'noise' filter in Inkscape, I realised I needed a more consistent way of creating random dots.  I also think it is more pleasing to the eye if the dots do not overlap.  I hit upon the website created by Vinicius Sueiro, hosting a random dot generator.  You can input different sizes of radius and number of dots, which helps you experiment with different densities.  Helpfully, you can download the dots image as an SVG, which you can open up in Inkscape.  For those of you who use Inkscape: the SVG is made up of different individual circle clones.  I selected around a quarter of them at a time, and unified them as a path.  Then I unified all 4 paths.  Initially, I exported these paths as a JPEG.  I used them to finalise my image on Photoshop Elements, then translated it back into Inkscape so I could cut it out on the laser cutter.  (For more detail on how to prepare an art file for a laser cutter, see this blog post).

This was a really fun image to create!  The random dot generator is fantastic and  I was pleased with how the image turned out.  It was fun playing with the 'soft' or 'lost' edges of the cat, and having it backlit by the half moon.  The different densities and sizes of random dots were very effective at creating shadow and texture on the cat.  You can see the final lasercut and the woodcut ready and inked up above.  Below you can see a close up of the face.  It is a very sweet looking cat, and going door to door delivering it to my friends will (almost) make up for missing guising...