Landscape Drawing

My company is across the street from Papa John's international headquarters. Surprisingly, they have an incredibly well landscaped campus complete with rolling hills, walking trails, ponds, picnic tables, bridges, and a fountain! When it isn't ungodly hot (or cold) it's a wonderful place to take a walk, or drawing break.

Cat Scott
Louisville Graphic Designer and Illustrator
@gato108
www.CatScott.com

Dorney and Friends at Corner Door

Another sketch from our favorite bar & restaurant, Corner Door. This is Dorney & Friends, a talented bunch who played a great range of oldies, bluegrass, and classic rock.

Cat Scott
Louisville Graphic Designer and Illustrator
www.CatScott.com

Sketchbook: Corner Door

I've been trying to carry my sketchbook around again, and after 2 or 3 beers I got gutsy enough to sketch in public. Probably the first time in a year that I've done that. The waitress took the beer bottle away before I could finish it, whoever guesses what type of beer it was wins a prize!

Cat Scott
Louisville Graphic Designer and Illustrator
www.CatScott.com

Derby Etiquette Illustration for Louisville Magazine

Louisville Magazine, contacted me to do an illustration for their Derby issue this year, and of COURSE I jumped at the opportunity! It's always such an exciting issue to be a part of. The article is about Derby Etiquette and discusses how NOT to be "that guy" when you are out at Churchill Downs.

Below are the thumbnails I sent the art director:

She chose the bottom right option. Here's the final drawing before I took it to final:

And since I know you love seeing some behind-the-scenes action, here's a few of the reference photos we took. Pardon the poor white balancing, these aren't usually for the public's eye, they are just for getting a hand shape correct or a shoulder in place.

Till next time! p.s. Go Knights!

Cat Scott
Louisville Graphic Designer and Illustrator
www.CatScott.com

Louisville Painting

Louisville - 20" x 10" - Acrylic on Canvas
For Sale: $275, price includes shipping cost

Another half finished painting that I dusted off and finalized. After painting in oils for the Stella painting, it was strange to transition to the quick drying acrylics. But it was nice to not feel like like I was going to pass out while painting in my studio!

Cat Scott - Louisville Graphic Designer and Illustrator

Yoga in Louisville

Sorry, no art in this post. Instead just some nerdiness. I sought out yoga classes all over Louisville and made a calendar so I would have no excuse for missing a class. The master calendar for yoga in Louisville is below (click link for a GIANT version), and I'm sharing it with anyone seeking the same info.

Disclaimers:This calendar was created for personal use. The class times might change and this does not include ALL yoga classes, especially ones too far east for me to attend. If this gains popularity, I'll add more classes and I might even color code based on style. I encourage you to contact me if you notice a schedule change or want me to add bikram*.

Enjoy!

*I am afraid of passing out in the heat of Bikram, so it does not interest me at this time.

Tuesday Coolsday - Casey Emrich

Every Tuesday, I will feature a Louisville artist whose work I admire.

Casey Emrich - Jewelry Artist

I met Casey at the Buy Local First Fair at the Louisville Visual Art Association this weekend. She recognized me as a fellow Sacred Heart Academy graduate (not sure how when she wasn't in my class. She must have the best memory EVER). We shared memories of our old art teachers and I learned about her: Her beautiful little jewelry pieces are made from reclaimed findings that she paints and reassembled. She and her partner are opening a new boutique called "Consider Boutique" opening around the Holiday season right in my 'hood, the Highlands.

Visit her LeeluQ Etsy Shop to snatch up some of her goodies. I have my eye on the Autumn Branch (above, top right)!

"Food for Thought" for Louisville Magazine

Tonight, Louisville Magazine is having a launch party for their May issue. I'm especially excited because not only do I have an illustration in this issue, but I have my very first contributor's blurb!

The story is about a woman in her 40's who decides to go to culinary school and finds her age, experience, and lack of distractions to be beneficial to learning. It was a very sweet and inspiring story.

I was excited to be able to use my "sketchbook style" here again. Thanks to art director Kelly Waterman for the fun assignment!

- Cat

Cat Scott - Louisville Graphic Designer and Illustrator

Racino Downs

The January issue of Louisville Magazine is out on a newsstand near you!* The gang at LouMag needed an illustration for an important feature article about how legalizing slot machines could save Kentucky's horse industry.

I'll do my best to sum up the multi-faceted and interesting story: Other states have legalized gambling to fund their horse racing industries and are thus able to fund giant purses for winning horses. Therefore, if someone wants to make a lot of money racing horses, they are going to move to Indiana or Pennsylvania where the money is. Kentucky's rich horse history and culture are suffering because Churchill Downs simply cannot afford to keep up with such lavish prizes without legalizing casinos.

During the thumbnail process, I kept thinking that the story really boiled down to the horses that were going to win or lose - they were truly the ones betting on a win. So I sketched a horse at a slot machine. The team loved it, and I got to do my first "Animal Acting Like a Human" illustration!

Thanks to reference photos and the artistic license to make joints bend in opposite ways, I drew up this lovely Gambling Horse.

One of my other thumbnails ended up working well as a spot illustration (below). You LOST fans will notice that I used some of The Numbers as the prize amount... I'm such a nerd.

Another fun project for LouMag under my belt.  Looking forward to the next assignment!

Thanks for reading,

Cat

*Unless you are one of the millions of people not in Kentuckiana

Dangers of Cycling: Louisville Magazine

The November issue of Louisville Magazine is out, and inside you'll find one of my illustrations (so go out and buy one now, people of Kentuckiana!). 

The article, written by avid Louisville cyclist Joe Ward, draws attention to the dangers facing cyclists and the unfortunate deaths that have occurred because of drivers' negligence.

"Bicyclists on the roads are not the problem. The problem is motorists who don’t recognize their responsibility for the lives and limbs of their fellow citizens. It’s time for serious attention to the motor vehicle as a deadly missile."

Sadly, unless alcohol or excessive speed were cause for the deadly accident, the driver walks free and clear (well, except the excessive guilt they will probably live with, hopefully a la Crime and Punishment). 

Mr. Ward questions this lack of penalty and offers this solution:

"When a person kills somebody with his car and there are no mitigating circumstances, he or she should at very least lose his driver’s license for life.

Put them on bicycles. "

postscript:  These murderous drivers are the reason I have not touched my road bike since I moved to Los Angeles, where drivers are the most self involved, distracted, and ruthless of all!!

Oh, the nerves...

My sources tell me that the August issue of Louisville Magazine is on newsstands, and another one of my pieces graces the pages of this finely designed periodical.

This time around, we reverted to my "traditional" illustration style (the last assignment was my "sketchbook" style). The story is rather confusing, but I'll do my best to sum it up. Basically, a neurosurgeon's clinic who did surgeries for one hospital (UofL) signed up to do surgeries for another hospital (Norton) without telling UofL. UofL was forced to fire the clinic, and chaos ensued. It boiled down to money and contracts, trying to work for two separate hospitals, etc. The thumnail process for this was longer than usual as the editor, and the art director, and I struggled to find a strong solution that made sense. Some of my thumbnails are below.


We settled on the final thumbnail because it was a straight solution for a multi-layered story. I then proceeded with a final sketch and a quick color study so Kelly could begin choosing colors for the story layout.


For this piece my technique was a combination of a gouache wash, prismacolors, turpentine (used to melt the prismacolor and paint with the waxy pigment), and the bright light coming from the surgical lamps was created using washes of white acrylic with my favorite medium, GAC 100. Here's a closeup of the piece so you can see the texture.



Overall, I'm pleased with the piece, and so is the magazine (which is most important!). I would love to hear what you think, too!

Cheers,

Cat

Dysfunction Junction

I created this illustration recently for Louisville Magazine, and it's finally out on newsstands! The art director requested I use my "sketchbook style" which she discovered via my newly redesigned website, www.catscott.com. I'm really glad she suggested it - I thought the grittiness and messiness of the line work really worked well with the story, which was about Louisville's Spaghetti Junction and what a mess it has become. They're currently thinking about upping the concrete to 24 lanes - how completely ludicrous is that? By 2080 Louisville will become a tangled mess of freeways. I tend to side with the grassroots movement 8664 which seeks to replace the highways with tree lined boulevards and parks. We'll see what happens!

Here's the spread in the magazine with the art director's typesetting over my illo. It was kind of hard to leave space when you don't really know what's going to happen there. Now that I see the final, I think I should have done a wash over the "reserved space" but I didn't know how that would interfere with her typography.



Detail of the drawing. I used a Hi-Tec C blue pen and then did washes over the drawing with Acrylic mixed with Gac 100.



I just got another assignment from the folks at LouMag, for which I am always thankful.

Thanks for reading, and have a happy and safe 4th of July!

St. James Court Art Show Poster

Every fall, there is a huge, beautiful art festival in Old Louisville called the Saint James Court Art Show. Every spring, there is a competition for the poster for the event, and every year, I think, "I should enter." But I never do - not living in Louisville, I tend to forget about things like that. Earlier this week, while finishing an illustration for Louisville Magazine (coming soon to a newstand near you!), the poster contest popped in my head and I hopped over to google to check it out.

The due date was 3 days away. I took it as a sign.

I have been diligently plugging away at it ever since I sent off the final illo to LouMag. I ran into some technical difficulties though: How could I scan or photograph original artwork for a 24"x30" poster (I always work bigger than the final printed piece)? And if I were so lucky as to win, how would I get such a large piece to Louisville?

So I decided to tackle this project in Illustrator. I've been digging Jessica Hische's work lately, so my piece was very heavily influence by her, as well as various Victorian/Art Nouveau artwork I found online.

Doing the handwritten text was the best part. First I sketched it out with pencil:

Then I filled it in with ink:

Then I scanned it and used the AutoTrace feature in Illustrator to make it a vector shape. I hate doing that part because it never looks quite right to me. It lost a lot of character when it was forced into vectors.

Overall, I really like the way the poster turned out. I included the famous statue that is in the heart of Saint James Court and some of the beautiful Victorian homes that line the court, and embellished the design with the ever popular Fleur-de-lis.

This piece was a challenge for me stylistically, and it is a risky entry.. most of the past winners have been pretty paintings of the statue with some super kerned out text. Let's hope the gang at St. James Court likes my approach!

Fleur de Lis

Fleur de Lis, Hi-Tec C and Acrylic in my Moleskin

When I was in Louisville, I saw this symbol popping up everywhere. It has long been a part of Louisville's history, but it recently became a main stream icon to represent the 'Ville. My dad, who seems to have become a Louisville historian in his spare time, explained to me where this symbol originated from.

Louisville was named in honor of King Louis the XIV. He was French. The French dig the Fleur de Lis.

Of course, he put it much more elegantly than that.

This lesson came in handy at the Smithsonian a few days later. We saw a 17th century violin called The Louis XIV embellished with fleur de lis. The more you know!

White Wedding

My cousin married her best friend, Mark, in March 2008 in Louisville. They were married at Holy Spirit Church (where I attended grade school) during the biggest snow storm in a decade. For Christmas, I commemorated their one-of-a-kind wedding day experience with a small drawing. If you look closely, you can see a little bride and groom on the doorstep.

Reinventing Louisville

I did this illustration for the May issue of Louisville Magazine. It is for an article called "Reinventing Louisville" by John Gilderbloom & Matt Hanka. The article throws out some ideas to make Louisville a bustling, thriving downtown. The whole issue is about downtown Louisville - plans for the future, what it's like to live downtown, etc. It's a fantastic issue - I encourage any fans of Louisville to purchase a back issue.

Louisville Magazine

Here is the illustration I did for the special education issue of Louisville Magazine, out now. The article covered the possibility of a couple of public schools in Louisville going to a same-sex format. Some say that separating the sexes eliminate hormone-related distractions and creates a learning environment that can cater to the learning differences between males and females (females are more abstract, literary thinkers, while males are more competitive and mathematical in their learning habits). The other school of thought believes the disctractions present in adolescent co-educational environments are something children need to cope with in order to survive the real world. In my illustration, I have the teacher standing divided between boys & girls, confused as to how to teach both in one environment when they learn so differently.

Heine Brothers centerpiece

Relaxing at the Frankfort Ave Heine Brothers when I was back in Louisville a few weeks ago. They had lovely centerpieces... a creative way to recycle an old glass bottle. If you are ever in Louisville, spend some time on Frankfort Ave - great restaurants, shopping, and fair-trade coffee at Heine Bros.