Litterbox Origins - story and 1st sketches
Added 2018-12-20 17:09:09 +0000 UTCSorry for being away for so long. I just wasn't feeling the funny last week. I'm back on it this week and nearly have a strip ready to go for you guys! In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy seeing the first ever Litterbox sketches!
I first came up with Litterbox while watching Daniel Tiger (again!) and rolling my eyes at how everything could be solved with a song. I grumbled to myself how things don't always work out so perfectly and mused at how funny it would be if someone made a Daniel Tiger spoof show with a "real" tiger family. I started thinking up scripts for my imaginary show and (half) jokingly wondered how much the Daniel Tiger voice actors would charge to do it -then it hit me. I could make it a comic!
I started working on my tiger family designs. They say that the key to a memorable cartoon character is that it should be recognizable from a silhouette, so I played with proportions to see which ones worked for the various family members.
The baby was originally a girl to better match the Daniel Tiger show:
It was at this point when I became frustrated with the "tiger" angle. It's hard to make tigers look different from each other and drawing their stripes was already driving me nuts. My husband wisely suggested that I make them cats instead, so they could be more unique AND it would open the door to a bunch of cat jokes.
Suddenly, unharnessed from my spoof idea, I was free to make the "Litterverse" world however I wanted, rather than be restricted to a twisted version of DTs Neighborhood. I love world building and weird animal facts, so I was in my element -although I kept the mom as a ginger tabby as a nod to her tiger roots.
