Behind the Art: Cat Stickers

Meow!

I’m Sas, the creator of Cat Stickers – a collection of cute cat NFTs on the WAX blockchain. Through my project, I get to draw my favourite subject (cats!), come up with fun ways to interact with my amazing cat-loving community, and I get to make people smile!

I have 3 types of stickers that I create: common, uncommon, and rare. The common ones are static, while the uncommon and rare ones are animated. Let’s have a look at how I make them!

1) Choose a Cat from ‘The List’

It’s been over a year of Cat Stickers (I can’t believe it!) and throughout the year, I’ve had many people suggest cats for me to draw. Every time someone suggests something that I like, I write it down. This has resulted in a rather long list of cats to draw, which you can view in my Discord in “the list” channel.

The best is when I get super inspired to draw a specific cat, and I can picture it clearly in my head. But often, I spend ages deciding on a cat to draw from the list.

2) Create the Outline

Now that I have chosen a cat to draw, it’s time to start creating it. I’m going to show you the process using the main Cat Sticker cat, Mimi!

As I use Figma to draw my cats, they are in vector form. To get all technical, a vector is an image that is built by mathematical formulas using points on a grid, and they can be infinitely resized without losing resolution.�As you can see in the outline of Mimi, there are lots of little blue dots. These are the vector points.

So I guess it’s more like constructing a cat, rather than drawing it. But you get the idea.�Sometimes I do start off with a sketch on my iPad, but then I trace over it in Figma to turn it into a vector.

3) Add Colour

Now is the fun part – adding colour to the blank cat!
This all depends on what I’m creating.

If I’m creating a Custom Cat Sticker, I will chat with the owner and use a picture of their cat to try to get the colours and markings just right.

If it’s a normal Cat Sticker, I have free reign! Unless it’s based on a character – then I try to use that character’s colours.

For Mimi, I use a light grey and a cute blush pink colour. Adding colour is as simple as clicking on the part I want to fill, and selecting a colour! I love it.

4) Animate

As I mentioned earlier, if the cat is uncommon or rare, it’ll be animated.

In order to animate the whiskers and eyes for this rare Mimi Cat Sticker, I have to create each frame in the animation. If it’s a more complicated animation, this step can take ages and can be very tedious! But the end results are always worth it.

Then I combine the frames using https://ezgif.com/. This turns it into a moving gif! It’s so fun to see it come to life.

5) Stare at the Finished Cat

Yep, this is so important it gets its own step.

Because this cat cannot be changed once I put it on the blockchain, I make sure to check that there are no mistakes.

This, however, can take me hours, if not days. I will stare at every inch of the cat looking for anything that’s off. Then I will look at it the next day to double-check. If I’m feeling particularly nervous, I’ll check again the next day.

It’s a lot of staring, but for good reason. I once created an NFT of one of my cats with 2 sets of eyebrows. Don’t even ask me how that was missed by me, my parents, my partner, AND my friend.

6) The Hardest Step: Naming the Cat

Ahhh naming. Every time I finish a cat, I always dread naming it.

It’s so hard for me to pick a name… I’m that person that stands in front of the sweet aisle at the store for like 10 minutes, not able to pick something. So choosing a name for a cat that will be minted onto the blockchain forever?? Almost impossible.

I once asked my Discord for help naming this rice cat in a bowl. We eventually landed on Rhys and Jasmine, so I created a poll to let them pick between the two names. They made the results equal so there wasn’t a clear winner… on purpose… Let’s just say I’m scared to ask for help again hahaha!

Once all of these tasks are complete, I upload the cat to WAX using AtomicHub, pray to every god ever that I haven’t made a mistake, and then I hit the ‘create NFT’ button. This makes me nervous every. damn. time. I need help XD

I hope you have enjoyed seeing how I create my cats! My collection on WAX is one of the best aspects of my life and I’m so grateful for everyone that supports it! THANK YOU! <3

Check out the Cat Stickers collection here, follow Sas on Twitter, check out her website, and join the Cat Stickers Discord to stay up to date with drops, participate in giveaways, share cat pics and memes, and chat!