Cards 2022

The theme for 2022 is cats at home. I once read that no family can survive the COVID-19 pandemic without adopting a pet or buying an air fryer. We did both. We initially adopted a young adult stray cat and named her Sugar. She only stayed with us a few months and left when another cat came. This other cat was pregnant and gave birth in our house. We decided to temporarily take care of her and her litter of kittens until they were old enough to be given away. That was when Sugar left. Probably she felt her territory had been taken over. We had originally intended to give away both the mother cat and all her kittens. Eventually we only gave away three of the five kittens, and kept two, Froggy and Onga. No one wanted the mother cat so we kept her too, and named her Turkey.

There are reasons behind how we named the cats. Sugar because her colour was like brown sugar. Turkey because when she was pregnant her bulging torso looked like a Christmas turkey. Froggy because when he was little his hind legs were slowest to develop and he crawled like a frog with his hind legs when his siblings could already walk properly. Onga because he was the timid one always allowed us to carry him like a baby.

For the 2022 series I wanted to draw pictures that looked like they were taken with a wide angle lens. I had seen some manga artists do this and liked the style. So I took photos at home and picked some of them to turn into greeting cards. In each drawing I added a cat. I experimented with a few different ways to draw our cats. Eventually I decided the one with Turkey looked best, so she became the main character. Onga also appeared in the drawings, but not Froggy or Sugar.