Work in progress

Back to our cat book

My brother has resumed work on our cat book. If you don’t know what I am talking about, here is the first post I wrote about it. The book is about a house full of cats. There will be seven areas in total. We started with the kitchen. After that we worked on the library, the garden, and the attic.

Now I am working on the toy room. My brother drew the initial sketch and mapped out larger furniture:

Now it’s my job to add all the details: toys, book, stuffed animals, and dozens of cats.

Every image is a sum of its parts

You guys know that my brother and I have been working on our cat book. Each page takes a while.

You start with a rough sketch:

On top of it you create a cleaner sketch:

And then you keep adding details. Some things you can draw from memory. But if you are unsure how something looks you find references and take photos of things that you want to add. Here I took a photo of a plant spray bottle and then drew it:

I googled strawberries and then sketched them too using photos as references:

I searched for various plants and flowers for inspiration:

And I even used one of my designs with two cats and added them to the image:

And that’s how the whole drawing is made 🙂

Garden progress

I’ve been working on the garden area of our cat book and I wanted to show you how it’s progressing.

Here is one of the first sketches:

I am now adding details and more cats and basically looking for plant references online and drawing them. This is what I have so far:

The right side of the image is too empty — I am going to work on that next.

Our Cat Book: fixing garden composition

My brother and I are making our first book about cats. Today I’ve been working on the garden area. Here is the initial sketch:

Cat book by Justyna Dorsz and Rafał Dorsz (Work in progress)

The problem is that the trees create a kind of frame in the picture, as so:

There’s still a lot of space outside those borders made by trees. That’s not a good composition because you can’t really draw anything interesting there. The eye will naturaly see what’s inside the borders and will miss anything that is outside.

To fix that, I moved the whole image left so that there’s not so much of that useless space on the left. And then moved the other tree more to the right:

Now I am adding more cats and details but that’s not ready to show yet.

What happened to the book?

You might have wondered what happened to the book about cats that my brother and I have been working on. We had to put it on hold — other projects got in the way. But now we are finally back to it.

A book about cats by Justyna Dorsz and Rafał Dorsz

Above, you can see the initial sketches of four areas that we are illustrating. The whole book is about a house full of cats. Each two-page spread is one area, and there will be seven areas in total. I am now reworking the garden and plan to post an update tomorrow.