Doesn't this kitty look sharp! This sexy little lady cat is "Penelope Pussycat" from Warner Brother's Looney Tunes cartoons. She is the cat that is constantly being chased by the love-struck skunk Pepe LePew, and now you can see why! Some animator had a fun time designing this character! If you remember Penelope looking like a normal cat without an hourglass figure and walking on all fours in the Pepe LePew cartoons you would be correct-- she originally was just a cat in the old Looney Tunes shorts. However, for the 1995 Looney Tunes movie Carrotblanca she was turned into a sexy upright walking femme fatale and was the lead female part opposite of Bugs Bunny. My drawing is based from her "Carrotblanca" design.
The objective of this drawing was to give it the appearance of a "production celluloid," the hand-painted plastic sheets they used to use to make cartoons. Production celluloids, or "cels," are clear plastic sheets that have the character's outline on the front side and the character's colors painted on the back side. They are on clear plastic so that the cartoon's background art shows through. That's why there is a small shadow behind Penelope in the drawing- the cel she is on is suspended just above the white background, so her paint is blocking the light. Also included on many cels sold by studios are a gold studio logo stamped in the lower left-hand corner of the cel and the animator's signature, both things I have tried to represent in this drawing.
As proud as I am about how this drawing turned out, it wasn't worth the time I put into it. This draw took me well over 20 work-hours to complete from start to finish! This was because I did a lot of experimenting with Paint Shop Pro tools and features that I have never used before with this drawing. Originally I couldn't even decide how I was going to even draw Penelope. High-quality images of her on the Internet were fairly hard to find, and as a result I had already started drawing her as a cat before I found pictures of the feminine dress-wearing Carrotblanca version of her. So halfway through the rough sketch of her I erased her cat body and replaced it with a furry one, and lost a lot of time in the process. Because she is a compromise design she ended up being super feminine like her Carrotblanca design yet still being nude like her cat form. I chose that particular combination because she looks good as a furry and because I liked her black-white fur design and didn't want it covered up by a long dress.
Even though I had recently been experimenting with digital coloring when it came to coloring Penelope I went straight back to my good old colored pencils. Coloring her with colored pencils turned out to be a waste of 2 precious hours. Even though you can still see the blacker ink lines through black colored pencil on a black character, the lines didn't show up well enough for you to be able to easily distinguish Penelope's body parts where they overlapped. I scrapped the colored pencil drawing and started over from scratch.
I decided to look into how Warner Brothers solved the problem of showing black characters' overlapping outlines. They solved the problem by making the external ink lines black and the overlapping ink lines a light gray color. I decided I could do the same by using masks and coloring the drawing digitally on the computer. To make the light gray lines I made a mask of the outline and then used the spray can tool to paint the gray lines gray. After spending several hours coloring it I decided the drawing looked horrible, and started over again from scratch! The next day I decided to make the gray lines by using a mask of the outline like I did before and then erasing the lines that were to remain black. I changed the color of the remaining black lines to white, and then pasted that onto the image. Since the top lines were white and the lines underneath were black, I adjusted the shade of gray I wanted the overlapping lines to be by adjusting the opacity of the top lines. And thankfully it turned out much better than my first digital coloring attempt.
After all of that I spent another long series of hours making the shadow behind Penelope and then making the imitation studio logo and signature. To add insult to injury, I thought the cel idea wouldn't take to long to do so I did it on a low-resolution version of the image. I ended up spending hours on it and it turned out great, but the image is so small I can't use it to make high-quality prints. I spent all of this time on Penelope and I can't even make good looking prints of her! It's such a shame. All things accounted for; drawing this picture of Penelope was still a lot less painful than going out and purchasing an actual production cel of her. That is because cels of Penelope used to make the movie Carrotblanca cost about $650! Please let me know if you like this drawing!
The pencil work was done on 80lb. Strathmore medium-surface drawing paper with a Sanford Non-Photo blue pencil. I then inked it with size 05 ZiG Millennium pen. It was then cleaned up, darkened, and colored in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04.
All text and original multimedia is © 2002 Daniel Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.