🌴This drawing has been decades in the making🌴 When I was very small, my parents had a print in their apartment. At some point it fell victim to the passage of time and probably found its way into a donation box or a trash bag (we'll never know). The art deco-esque image of a black cat jumping off a table in front of a window seared itself into my infantile brain and became my artistic white whale. To this day the original artist remains unknown. 🔮 Fast forward to 2012, where I had emerged from the cocoon of childhood as a fresh faced design student. At this point I had just barely learned to use Adobe Illustrator. Happenstance lead to me unearthing The Print. It was fuzzy and shrouded in shadow, dreamlike in the background of an old photo. I was confident that I could use my newly-acquired Adobe superpowers to recreate it. Chronologically, this was a point in time before I had learned to use curve tool and also before I was told to leave gradients in the 90s where they belonged, along with solar flares. I was pretty pleased with the result at the time and moved on with my life. 👾 Present day: The year is 2022. I have spent the entirety of my 30s living through a pandemic. I come across old photos of The Print while backing up files. The passage of time has conspired to give me ten additional years of illustration experience as well as a retina screen for my aged eyes. I decide to take another crack a recreating the print. 🐈 The fuzziness of the source material meant that in a lot of ways I was recreating my idea of the image more than creating a verbatim copy. 🐱🌈 I'm happy with this iteration. I managed to push it further than I could at 22. Maybe I'll recreate it again in 2032. 💫 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ #drawing #illustration #artpost #artretrospective #artdeco #digitalart #catart #photoshop #procreate #artportfolio #design #lowbrow #southafricanillustrator #blackcats #digitalillustration #sketch #doodle #instaart #graphicdesign #illustratorsoninstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CZjk_Itq-M2/?utm_medium=tumblr
