BUILDING CAT STAIRS PT 1 & 2

I love my little studio cats Mina & Coco. They’re growing fast and it’s been hard trying to keep them indoors. They are very curious, whiley cats. Mina has already taught herself to push down on door knobs. They want out, but I’m trying to keep them safe. We have future plans to build them a catio. But in the meantime, I thought why don’t we take advantage of the vertical space we have in the house and build them some cat stairs to use and hang out on?

I’ve always admired how cute cat stairs are. However they’re also super expensive to buy — I just can’t justify $100 per piece of a cat shelf / stairs setup. So why not try building my own? At this step Pinterest was my best friend. There were so many cute ideas online, though some of them were really unclear in terms of how they were properly supporting a cat’s weight. So take that as my advice to only use ideas online (including mine!) as a base idea, but it’s up to you to make sure that a structure is strong and that it is supported by studs in your walls.

My fave example, from Homedit.com

Normally I find sketching building ideas to be quite easy, however the space I had in mind had a few new challenges. First, getting the heights over widths correct — I wanted stairs that would both meet the second floor beam, and reach the second floor high window. (Note, the cats were already debating about jumping from this beam TO the high window, so these stairs would be a way to keep them safer than if they were attempting this Darwan-award level jump.)

The second challenge was that I wanted to use the corner area, which would also help is solidifying the whole thing. But drawing across three dimensions in this way was unique for me. It’s not like building a deck, where I can just focus on one plane at a time.

After a lot of research and a lot of sketching I found something I thought could work and we got to building! You should customize your design to your own space. Things to keep in mind: cats feel more comfortable climbing steps that are not too high or to smooshed, and this will change as they grow up, if they are currently young cats. We may end up changing the distance of the stairs if our cats get very large.

Materials we used: Screws Wood 1” x 8”  , 1”x 12”, 1”x1”s , Saw, Drill, shelf supports ours were extras from Home Hardware, Scrap carpet pieces, or something you can use as grips for the tops of the wood so that it is less slippery for kitty feet.

It's a Toilet, not a Trashcan - Don't flush weird stuff down the toilet!

As part of an effort to stop the public from flushing disinfectant wipes and other non-poop, pee, blood stuff, I created the concept for a series of ads for the Capital Regional District, along with the CRD Environmental Services department. These ads were shown as movie theatre posters & mirror stickers, traditional ads, web ads and YouTube pre-roll.

The creative inspiration for this ad was to play with the idea that people often like to draw with marker in public toilet stall, so the text here is illustrated in a marker style.

The base image was chosen after looking at hundreds of toilets on stock (I can tell you WAY too much about toilets now! For example, did you know that the curving pipe shape at the side of some toilets make some people uncomfortable?) and then applying the illustrations with Procreate on the iPad with an Apple Pencil. Later, the procreate images were traced in illustrator to turn them into vector images, so that we could work with infinite scalability but still keep that sketchy style.

Awesome actor Sean Tabares gave his voice to the pre-roll! He’s the best. IG @seantabares

I’m grateful the CRD gave me the creative room to play with different media, including this hand-animation using Procreate. This was part of an instagram story.

What it looks like to work in onion layers in Procreate animation mode (below).

iNaturalist Biodiversity Challenge 2021

In 2021 I was I had the privilege of participating in the promotion of the Capital Regional Districts new exploration of using iNaturalist to encourage community awareness about biodiversity as part of the Environmental Protection department. This was also the first time that were able to use instagram to it’s full potential, by using not only instagram and Facebook, but instagram stories as well.

Note: This was part of my work as part of the capital regional district (the regional government in southern Vancouver Island). To view other corporate items, view my graphic design portfolio.

Augmented Reality Fun! (AR) Forest vs. Bureaucracy

AR Fun!

AR is a growing technology that piqued my curiosity ofter virtually attending the 2021 Adobe Max conference. Currently there are two main accessible ways to play with AR, one is through the Adobe program Adobe Aero and through Facebook/ instagram with their technology Spark studio.

It was the conference that introduced me to Adobe Aero, my first experiment. I wanted to excite a friend by bringing one of her favourite illustrations of mine (one of Cathedral Grove) to live in her workspace. The results you can see to the side in this TikTok video.

To check out my further experiments with AR, see my Magic Owls post &/or portfolio, which explores AR using Instagram tech.