Occasional Wombat

I don’t appear to have a category for “things that probably could have been done more easily if I’d set out to do it that way from the beginning.”  Yet.

This began from a desire to draw a picture of a sleeping cat.  I realized I would probably never be happy with such an image if I tried to draw it freehand without reference, at least not without a lot more practice, so I figured I’d look through pictures of my cat for a reference photo.  Then I figured, what the hell, I’ll just trace one.

Then it got silly.

After tracing the picture and then dropping the background out, I decided it didn’t look right without color.  So I started to color it, only my cat is black, you see.  You kind of lose the detail that way.  Then I decided to color sample the fur from the original photo (because black cats are really very dark brown), and that looked too flat.  So I wound up just pattern cloning the original photo.

This means that what I was left with was, basically, the original picture outlined.  I did a little more pattern cloning to, say, remove the playstation controller that was covering up part of one of her paws in the original, and remove her tag from the picture.  I did also add a comfy-looking background that was not from the original picture, and was instead a photograph I had taken on another occasion of a different object entirely.

There’s something to be said for a good old-fashioned erase tool.