Design a Day Challenge - Day One

Yesterday was my first day of the Challenge, so I set myself a strict minimal time limit to get the ball rolling. I grabbed my Wacom pen and and tablet, fired up Adobe Illustrator and set to work.

Step 1 - Design a Character

Quickly I drew out the basics of a character. Fat body, tail, stripes... I was going for a cat. Here's how the character developed:

I usually run through several options before finding something that I like. In this situation, I was battling the clock so my amendments were fast and furious!

Step 2 - Add Variations

Next, I decided to make a few characters by tweaking the faces. Pinky cat is very jolly, but ol' bluey is feeling gloomy. Why? Who knows. There's a story behind this design; a story for another day perhaps. Greeny is undecided. 

Step 3 - Make a Repeat

I opted for a repeating pattern with this design since I could toss the characters around quite freely. This was a very quick layout since my time limit was about to expire!! I liked the shapes that the tails made weaving around in the repeat.

And there we have it. Day One - Tumbling Cats.