Cat Character Designs

These two images are the pre-production I'm doing for another comic.  I usually work out my character designs by drawing them in pen in my sketchbook, but I wanted to try something different this time so I busted out the watercolors and went to town.

One of the trickier parts of character design is designing the cast.  Its easy to come up with a single character, but its harder to create a group were each individual is readily recognized.  In these images I played with acting and body types to give each of the cats a different look.  Granted these are preliminary designs, I plan on exaggerating things in subsequent sketches, but even in my first attempts I am already thinking of how each of the cats will visually differ from one another.

I started by using a large brush and a light wash to quickly lay in silhouettes.  After that dried I used a black color pencil to draw in the linework.  I then went back in and dry brushed in details and cleaned things up in certain areas with white gouache.  The top image is the final artwork.