A popular assignment this week at DS106 has been Fat Cats Make Art Better.

In this assignment a picture of a fat cat is added to a classic art work or famous photograph. You can see some examples at the link above.

Here is my attempt at the assignment.

That’s my story. Any questions?

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

Just testing out the Awesome Cintiq and what better thing to do than make art better with some fat cats???

This is Nicholas Poussin’s Bacchus & Midas holding Trophy (le grand chat)

I’ve been wanting to do this assignment since the brilliant, lovely and talented Annie Belle tweeted this hilarious link to Great Artists’ Mews a few weeks ago. I love seeing new DS106ers come on board, get charged and make beautiful art. It’s inspiring and reinvigorating.

I will write more about my process (I promise) but I only have this Cintiq tablet for another 20 minutes before we hand it to a faculty member to make some mathemagic.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

As soon as I saw Annie’s visual assignment for ds106 postulating that “Fat Cats make Better Art” I wanted to do it. And when Nick Antonini actually did his own version, I knew I had to do it now. So I spent some time thinking tonight about what kind of image I would put my fat cat in. Most of the examples on the insanely cool Fat Cat site (which is all in Russian) are mainly featuring the baroque art of Europe during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Given I am a proud, red-blooded American that loves freedom and pizza, I decided against this trend. I wanted to return the art to the exceptional lands that invented the web, save for that Tim Berners-Lee guy.  I went with my favorite 19th century US artist Winslow Homer, I figured putting a fat cat on a small dingy that is forever staring at two huge fish might introduce some much needed tension to the artwork. I am pretty happy with the way it came out, in the end.

My Process
This one was easier than I expected. I pulled Winslow Homer’s image from here and then looked around for some sedentary fat cats that are staring intently. I came up with this one from the abnormal hospital.

After downloading the images, I opened the Winslow piece, and then opening the image of the cat as another layer.

I then traced out the cat with the lasso tool and cut the cat out and then pasted it into a new layer. I then deleted the old cat layer I had just cut, and scaled the new layer with the cat to fit comfortably in the dingy by going to Layer–>Scale.

Finally, I selected the cat and used the Filters–>Artistic–>Oilify to make the cat more like a painted piece, and adjusted the brightness to dim the whiteness of the fur a bit.

And that is that, fun, fun, fun.

Fat cats make art better. I’d never thought of that, but I wish I had. My in-laws have a cat they call Fatty. She looks like swallowed a football helmet. The photos they sent don’t do her justice. Since her proportions are surreal, I thought of Magritte:
But on the other hand, Jasper Johns is one of my favorite artists:

She seems to fit there better.

How I Did It: basic photoshoppery. The original photo of Fatty had her sitting on the lawn, which is why she has that greenish aura in the Magritte mashup. I used some feathering on the selection and picked up some background. I duplicated the background layer and used the magic wand to get the wood in the background and deleted it. Then I traced around some of the left shoe-foot and cut out that background. I put the cat behind the duplicate layer so it looks like she behind the shoes. There’s a lighting problem though.

For the second picture, I made the cat cut-out black and white to get rid of the green aura. Then I stuck her in the corner and trimmed a little off the side and bottom so it looks like she’s inside the frame. It almost seems like she belongs.

(click click click for view full sized artistic glory of this work of fine art)

Fine art, indeed, this limited edition original painting is available for auction coming soon.

This is my bit for the Fat Cats Make Art Better ds106 assignment contributed by Annie Belle who is just rocking the class so far. The instructions, if you please…

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

(Tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments334)

I use “classic art” in its most literal sense, for what gallery is not complete without a large painting of Dogs PLaying Poker?

For this one, I found the base painting on flickr (search “dogs poker” in compfight.com)

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by allspice1

and then it is rather easy to find photos of fat cats in the same place- here is my subject because he/she is posed in a poker position

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by AlyssssylA

In Photoshop, I positioned the cat in a layer above the base scene. I aplied the paint daubs filter to make it look a bit more textured. Then, I use the selection tool to grab the outline of the chair and table as areas, I flip back to the cat and use to delete so it appears behind key objects. Finally I added (rotated too) a few copies of this playing card to fill out the feline’s royal straight flush.

I am next thinking of a whole series of feline Velvet Elvises….