Orange Cat on a Purple Bicycle

I originally posted about this Inktober drawing back in 2016. I put my “Orange Cat on a Purple Bike” design onto my Zazzle storefront, and was pleasantly surprised when it became one of my best sellers. The drawing was a very personal design (firstly, since being given my first ginger tabby when I was two, I’ve always been easily distracted by any who wanders into my line of sight…secondly, because my friend Julie passed away when we were eighteen, making this drawing is a bit of a tribute to her). I would wonder what drew people to an orange cat riding a purple bike.

In 2019, I joined the online writing group “12 x 12” (or as my husband calls it, “144”). The challenge is to write a picture book manuscript each month for a year (twelve manuscripts in twelve months). I had been jotting down story ideas for decades, mostly on scraps of paper which were tucked into stacks of papers and between book pages, so I started gathering them. Among them was one story idea about an adventurous orange cat.  Grafted together with my drawing, it became my manuscript for May. Then the real fun will begin: filling 32 pages with illustrations!

Here is my original post:

I enjoy painting way more than drawing, to the point of procrastinating for hours just to put off sharpening a pencil. So last year when I heard about Inktober, I knew it would be a good thing for me. As you probably realized immediately, Inktober is held each October. The challenge is to draw (and ink) a picture for each day of the month.

I knew that I wouldn’t be able to finish something for each day (even before I fractured my foot and ended up unable to make it to my studio), so I made it my personal goal to try as many different methods and kinds of pens as I could. My favorite of the pens I experimented with was an inexpensive brown brush pen that I used to ink this tabby on a bicycle.

A few months later, I decided to color the ink drawing. Some of the color choices were easy: of course the cat should be an orange tabby like my first two cats, Whiskers and Whiskers II.  The flowers in the basket should be my favorite, pink roses. The bicycle reminded me of the one my childhood friend Julie had. My own bike was over twenty years old, corroded, and so tall for me that the seat gave me a wedgie whenever my feet tried to reach the pedals. Even so, Julie was always a bit puzzled by my envy of her bike. The brake pads on my bike were as dried out and cracked as old cheese, but Julie’s bike didn’t have brakes (or gears) at all. But her bike was a few years newer than my bike, fit her properly, and best of all, was an incredibly lovely shade of purple. So of course my orange tabby should be riding a purple bike.

Even before I painted the bicycle purple, I wondered what color to paint the tabby’s scarf. It needed to be bright enough to go along with all the other bright colors, but if I painted it purple or orange, it would look too matchy-matchy. Blue wouldn’t stand out enough from the sky, and there was already enough green from all the grass and trees. The painting sat for another few months until I posted it on Facebook and Twitter and asked people to vote. No single color was the clear winner. Which is why the cat is wearing a multi color scarf.