A Day with Porch Kitty

So a bit of backstory... About 2 years ago, by husband's family found that their porch was chosen to be the new found home for a neighborhood stray cat. It was very skiddish and aloof towards most, only really getting near one or two people. Since no one could get near enough to figure out if it was a boy or girl, we deemed it 'Porch Kitty' and from thenceforth was known as such.

As far as we knew, Porch kitty would wake up. Wait for food. Eat. And then be gone exploring all day. Another, probably a more plausible, reason that Porch Kitty wouldn't stay near the house all day is because of the other stray cat, Chachi -- a orange tomboy cat who had the personalitly of a mean landlord who always treated you like you were late on your rent. But I digress--- I continued to wonder where PK would travel off to? What did it discover or play with? Did it get into any trouble or did it have pretty peaceful, long summer days in the Tennessee heat. Which is what inspired this storyboard/color script!

My color inspo was from a single image from Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the heart. The colors and depth, lights and darks, is so rich and warm. I wanted to learn from their use of color is this shot to unify my pallete for this script.

It all started off as a quick sketch and my love for this cat, and now two years later I've been able to complete it. I'm really happy with how it has come together, though I know it still needs some fine-tuning. I think if I keep working on it, by the end of another two years I'd like to turn this into an animated short and possibly a picture book. But we will see. Porch Kitty sadly passed away last year. We were all so heartbroken, and so was the neighborhood. My mother-in-law was able to connect with some neighbors to see if anyone else had their own photos and memories with PK. Turns out PK was actually owned by a couple two streets over. They moved several blocks away, but continued to let PK be an indoor/outdoor cat. After sometime they noticed PK didn't come home one day. Turns out it trekked all the way back to it's orginal neighborhood that they moved away from - my in-laws neighborhood. I guess it missed it's home. The owners saw that people were taking really good care of PK, and kept in touch with neighbors to see how it was doing from time to time. We also were told... Porch kitty was a boy! A very cute southern gentlemen who liked to sit on his porch.