Cats Trio Re-Revisit

I recently posted about a Cats Trio revisit that I drew at the end of last year...well, during my friend group's RPG session, I started doodling and started drawings of the cats again. And as a fun indulgence, I did a full finished piece of it.

For those who don't know, CATS TRIO was a comic my friends and I worked on (never finished) at the start of high school. Three mutated/anthropomorphic cats befriend a similar raccoon as the group discover their shared origins, survive in abandoned places away from human eyes, and avoid being hunted by another of their kind (a TMNT homage to be sure). 

For a past post about Cats Trio: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2017/08/cats-trio-revisit-cover.html
Or, watch the Plotmasters Project episode about it here: https://www.theplotmasters.com/cats-trio

I took the rough pencils of the three cats I drew during game night, then revised a better drawing of the raccoon before putting them all into Photoshop and moved and resized them until I had a composition I liked. To help me see each of their forms, I blocked in some base colors for each character so that as I moved them individually, their colors moved with them.

Using a photo of a derelict bridge as reference, I penciled a background that gave the whole piece a 'Stand By Me' vibe.

The layout was then printed and taped to the back of a sheet of 11" x 17" Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my Huion lightpad I'm able to see through the surface of the bristol to the printout to use as a guide as I ink the lineart. I used a Copic Miltiliner SP 0.7 nib pen.

I left the details of the characters fairly open focusing more on line weight for their contours, fur texture, and clothing wrinkles. I spent more time on detail for the environment.

The inks were then scanned and brought into Photoshop again where I started the coloring process by blocking in all the flat colors (this professional version of coloring-in-the-lines is called 'flatting). Most of the color choices were already established from past Cats Trio pieces, but I did make some adjustments of value, saturation, and hue for this piece to help the viewer's eye move through it better.

At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black) on the bindle bag, their pupils, and all of the background.

The final art (seen here without the Cats Trio logo) was rendered using the dodge and burn tools. I happened to be finishing the color rendering on the final character's at the virtual RPG gaming session with that same group of friends one week later). I pushed the background way back to make sure the characters were more of the focus (ironic with all the ink detail back there)

These characters are old friends. They occupy a special place in my heart that idealizes a great time in my young life establishing lifelong friendships. And while I have no current plans to develop Cats Trio, it's always fun when I get a chance to say hello to these guys and keep them alive.