Meet our newest addition to our Cryptids and Cats collection: Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster!
Our first cryptid illustration was Mothman (and a cat) about two years ago. When I added "cryptids" to our tagline, I had big plans to create a whole series, but narrowing it down to my top five took longer than expected. That list included Sasquatch (Bigfoot), the Jersey Devil, a Yeti (Abominable Snowman), Mothman, and Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster.
Now, that list is finally complete - each cryptid paired with a cat, of course! I’ll be rolling them out over the next few weeks. My inspiration for Nessie came from the famous grainy photo taken in 1934, but I wanted to make it fun and cute.
My first design looked like a weird blob to me, so I scrapped it and redrew almost everything, and now I'm happy with how it turned out! Since I’ve been pushing myself to create more detailed backgrounds, I went all in on the water and landscape.
As always, this illustration started with plenty of reference images and rough sketches before moving on to final line-work and colors in Procreate. I worked on my iPad Pro M4 with an Apple Pencil Pro and my drawing stand, then polished everything up in Adobe Photoshop for Mac.
I’m excited to share Nessie as the newest member of our ‘Cats & Cryptids’ collection, and I hope you love this one as much as I do!
