Happy Çaturday! Today will be all about George, and my different drawings of him reflecting different aspects of his personality.

George, the International Cat of Mystery, is a chameleon. (Being a master of disguise is, obviously, one of the job requirements.) At two months old he was perfectly capable of looking ancient; at two and half years old he was equally good at looking like a bright young kitten, like so:

Adult George looking young

This was an experiment in the use of different brushes in Procreate.1 Getting his mood right was all about getting the tilt of his head and the four-square forelegs. I love trying to draw him—trying being the operative word because although his features and body ratios have stayed essentially the same the last three or so years, his whole look can change radically. Here he is the same season, looking heavy, emotionally and physically.

Bigger, burlier, butcher than before—or at least appearing to be.

Now, at six and half, he and Charlie have finally started to behave like adult predators: they sleep about 92% of the time. Here he is last year:

Less tidy than usual

I decided to use this picture to draw him medieval style for my zoomorphics project:

George with Lindisfarne-Gospels style head

But well, I got no further than changing his head before it became clear that that untidy legs-and-tail clutter would make the stylised black and white schema I’d chosen to experiment with—spirals to represent joints and triangles for stripes—awkward, so I simplified the pose. Even so, his muscular hip and thigh ended up looking suspiciously like a cartoon ham:

Mixed-style George

A week or two ago the weather here took a decided turn towards the dark, wet, cold of winter, and since then both beasts have barely moved from their beds (that is, our bed) or chairs (that is, my wheelchair, or my NuStep exercise machine). Their sudden sloth had made me miss their kitten days when their antics were constant, an endless energetic delight: running, leaping, climbing, followed by sudden instant collapse into unconsciousness. As a result I found myself scrolling nostalgically through old kitten photos…

Here’s George at three months old.

Three months old

I’ve learnt a lot about how to draw Early Medieval style since that first, George-as-ham effort, so I decided to have a go at capturing his kitten-Georgeness. This time I abandoned the Lindisfarne-style head in favour of trying to draw what it actually looked like—ditto the paws—though still in vaguely Early Medieval-style. I kept the Lindisfarne-type inner lines.

George of Lindisfarne

I liked that, but then I wondered: How would he look Pictish style?

George the Pict

You’ll note that the two pictures are not identical—and I’m talking more than the Pictish joint curls. The differences are subtle but nonetheless I think they give the two Georges a slightly different feel.

Have fun trying to work it out.

These days I use Photoshop almost exclusively—probably because what I’m doing feels much less like representational ‘art’ and more like experimenting with graphic simplicity. ︎