What's With All the Cats?

[tealin]

Well, it started with The Amazing Maurice [who is a cat] and his Educated Rodents... This is odd because I was rather unimpressed with the book when I first read it, feeling it the 'youngest' of Mr Pratchett's kids' books (and a little condescending) but the radio adaptation is just so fantastically done – easily better than the other series of plays. Anyway, drawings.
Trying to draw Keith (the 'stupid-looking kid') but he ended up looking a lot like Wart. Badness. Must keep trying.
A couple of attempts at Maurice ... though he kind of ended up looking like a feline Bigwig. Sigh.

Then I happened to find a recording of Cats at my usual used CD place. Say what you like about the show as a show (I'm not a big fan of the leotards and plotlessness, myself) but I love T.S. Eliot and Andrew Lloyd Webber* so the two of them together ... it makes for a great album, independent of the stage production. And I think it would be a cool idea for an animated movie; sort of a Fantasia-esque collection of more or less unrelated shorts, each in a different style ... dunno if it'd ever catch on, though. Hah, they'd probably split them all up and release them on obscure DVD titles to prop up sales, like a certain Fantasia 2006... oh, Disney.

Bustopher Jones and Macavity
*and cats, for that matter

I was by no means catted out by the end of the day, but I went to a coffee shop near my place with a friend to go sketch for a couple of hours and managed a couple of halfway-decent things.

'Dear the Pope,
You're my favourite Benedict...'*
Oh wait, no. That's not the Pope. He's just got the eyes, man, the eyes... To his right is Hypothetical Hispanic Girl. I grew up in California and then Utah, places both with a Hispanic population of decent size, and both prone to one of the last remaining shreds of culturally 'acceptable' racism in the USA. There was always a feeling of 'us and them' and since I was one of 'us' I never really had much to do with 'them.' However, since moving to Canada, and therefore being separated from the whole issue for a number of years, I've come to appreciate Latin culture more, now that I can look at it a little more objectively. And I want to learn to draw the people. Unfortunately, I don't have much reference up here. So there you go, an idealized and blatantly stereotypical Latina. [facepalm]

*credit goes to the incomparable Armando Iannucci for that one

I realise with a shudder that I am better at drawing on a Cintiq now than on paper ... THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.

Comments

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

I've seen Cats twice. Once in London and once in Edinburgh. It does indeed have no plot worth speaking of, but my word it's impressive every other way.