Visualizing cats. What a pass time. For reasons not quite utterable, I’m not asleep at closing in on four in the morning. Rather I’m up and scraping pixels around this way and that making cats. Here’s one. Small and pink. Not quite an icon, but headed that way. I use Image Composer 1.5, which used to come as the graphic tool with Microsoft FrontPage. As a matter of fact, when I bought FrontPage a few years ago, imagine how unhappy I was to discover that Microsoft had abandoned Image Composer. I’d spent quite a bit of time mastering it. It creates vectored objects which you can then paint. The little illustration of Grizabella, which I included with a poem a few posts ago, was one of the training pieces. I taught students to use it, before it’s demise, too. I’m too cheap and too lazy to acquire and learn Adobe’s Illustrator or Photoshop, which my son, Justin, who is much wizzier than I am at electronic crafts these days, says are the right tools for the job. With Illustrator at $600 and Photoshop running $1000, well, that makes them less right.

Nevertheless, here they are. More cats from an obsolete tool. Why, some would say I am an obsolete tool. And sometimes I’d agree, with a grin, too. At least some of the time. May I live long enough to be a total anachronism. The pink kit above was about the fourth iteration of a sketch for sister Jill, who wrote a week or so ago and said she had a product she was going to market and she needed a quick sketch of a cat for branding and marketing. She explained to me a couple three times what the product was, but I’m still pretty clueless. Something to decorate or hide the defects of the interior of a car.

The curled cat, the blue one, is the second iteration of the third design. I threw one away just about as soon as I finished it–and I’m skipping several false starts. Anyway, they all are derived from pictures of Smoky, my cat. I pulled them into Image composer and, essentially, traced the shapes. It was mildly more tedious than that and had a little bit of art to it in the sense that I was free to choose the lines I’d follow in the tracing, but, essentially, they’re traced. If you look, you can see the source for the blue outline above and the source for the pink in the photo that’s with it. They weren’t very decent photographs, actually, but that doesn’t matter. In fact, it may have improved their value as models because there was less significant detail to abstract away. Abstraction being, for me, a process of subsuming details to a larger design. Big words. Who cares? I mean, besides me?