Cats Trio Revisit

I still find tremendous nostalgic comfort & joy in CATS TRIO: 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). Here is a new revisit I did just as a fun indulgence. 

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

This revisit came from my going through old sketchbooks to scan for Patreon and I found a thumbnail lineup of the group that I think I drew at the time of the Plotmasters Project episode. I pulled it out with the idea of just inking it at that same size...but quickly realized it was both very small and that the characters were too loose to go straight to ink (especially the further to the right).

So, I blew up a scan of the rough and re-penciled it at a larger scale. On the back of the paper I also penciled in a boarded up fence I wasn't sure I wanted to add or not. 

Both sides of the pencils were scanned and reassembled in Photoshop and I found an old rusted road sign to reference I could add my Plotmasters Project-era CATS TRIO logo to.

With that printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol, I started inking the piece on my Huion lightpad. On the lightpad I can see through the surface of the bristol to the printout to use as my 'pencils' as I ink with a Copic Multiliner SP 0.7 nib pen.

Inks were scanned and the color process began by adding flat color to everything establishing not only what areas are what colors, but also what the overall base colors are. I pulled the color choices I'd made from my Plotmasters Project episode revisit, but they still needed to be altered a bit (hue, value, saturation) here and there for this piece.

It's at this stage that I also establish the color holds (areas where I want the inklines to be a color other than black). I did this on their pupils, glasses, the sign text, and the rust.

Here again are the final rendered colors. To add the shadows, highlights and texture I sued the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop with a stock textured brush.

These characters feel like old friends. They occupy a special place in my heart that idealizes a great time in my life with great friends. 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.