Hello. And welcome to Cat Breading for Dummies.
To begin with you’ll need some items.

A cat. Some bread. And a knife. (The knife is not for the cat but the bread, don’t worry.)

I then asked for permission to put bread on my sister’s cat, seeing as the cats are hers. Let it be known that getting the “owners” permission will not mean the cat will be willing. Cats don’t really have “owners,” they just let the humans think that, the cats just do whatever they want.  In this house there are two cats, Schrodinger and Norfolk. They may look cute but beneath their adorable fuzzy exterior is a deadly beast.

Choosing the right cat is important. I chose Norfolk, he’s bigger and slower, while Schro moves at the speed of light. However, Norfolk has a giant head so it was difficult to get the bread over it.

It did not go well.

This is the point where you give up, lock your door so that cats can’t get you, and nurse your wounds (elmo band aids work wonders.

**No cats or Megans were harmed in this attempt of catbreading. In fact, Norfolk is now sleeping on my shoulder, crushing me, and deafening me with his purr**
***Since this was a complete fail I don’t deserve any stars for the catbreading assignment but I still tagged it under there***

Well, I haven’t done much with this whole ds106 world, but I came across this assignment and really wanted to mess around with this area of editing.  I am not even sure if it “fits” the assignment exactly, but this is what I thought of when I read about it.  Even if the cat was in the bread, the dog would still find it!

I really enjoyed looking at layering and messing around with GIMP a little bit.  I use Lightroom primarily, and I have always wanted to play around with GIMP a little more.  It took me awhile to get it the way I wanted, but it turned out pretty good.  Time is not abundant in my life right now…I think given more time I may have worked towards “perfecting” it a little more, but I was happy with how it turned out.  Hope you enjoy!

Dog found the right piece of bread

Get out in front of this meme or get out of the way! Beyond Cat Breading lies the bizarre space of Jim Groom Breading:

This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment:

The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)”

From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section

So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it.

Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping.

Phoooey.

As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to do was to put Jim’s face into a piece of bread. That was pretty easy to do- a bit of lassoing of his mug, shrinking the selection area, feathering, and cutting the hole in the bread, which I tweeted out as this image.

Just for giggles.

But thinking about how to use this in the assignments, do I make a new one for Jim Groom Breading? Nah… I just need to convince the viewer that this is a cat! I just found a photo of a cat:

and placed it on the top layer of my masterpiece. Some removal of the tip half, and then setting the layer style of the whiskers to “Lighten” got me closer to the needed but I still ended up using the eraser tool brush mode to get rid of more cat, and then some levels tweaking made the whiskers pop out a bit more.

That Jim, breaded, and on krazy kat. This assignment is only worth 1 star, which is what a slap a cat into the bread in Photoshop would rate, but I took it up a notch.

What can you bread?

If you want to have a go with this, I am sharing the photoshop file which has the whiskers and other parts in separate layers so you can put someone else into the bread mix.

http://cogdogblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/bread.psd (2.7 Mb PSD)