My Artistic Tribute to Garfield, the Monday-Hating, Lasagna-Loving Cat

I grew up in the eighties, and Garfield was one of the first things that really made me want to draw.

I loved Jim Davis’ comics, the cartoons, Garfield’s sarcasm, and basically everything about the character. I drew him constantly. I would copy poses and expressions from the comic strips, save Garfield strips from the newspaper, and try to figure out how Davis drew him.

For a while, I thought I wanted to draw newspaper comics myself. The problem was that I was much more interested in drawing characters than figuring out multi-panel storytelling, setups, punchlines, and all the other stuff that actually makes a comic strip work. Eventually I realized that wasn’t really what I wanted to do.

Instead, I kept drawing.

Over the years I studied industrial design, fine art in multiple dimensions (2D/3D LOL), interactive design, and graphic design. I drew all kinds of things, and Garfield mostly disappeared from my work for a long time. Cats, however, definitely did not.

At some point I became the guy who makes a lot of cat art, which in hindsight probably isn’t that surprising.

Recently I decided it was finally time to draw Garfield again, but instead of trying to copy Jim Davis like I did when I was a kid, I wanted to draw him the way I draw now.

I made the illustration in Procreate on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, then finished the color and print prep in Photoshop. It was fun revisiting a character I had drawn hundreds of times as a kid and seeing what he looked like after all these years of developing my own style.

And, of course, Garfield still works perfectly as a subject for me. He’s a cat, he’s sarcastic, and he generally looks annoyed to be involved in whatever is happening. Hard to argue with that.

The finished illustration is available as a 5x7" art print in my shop.

Mostly, though, it was just fun to draw Garfield again.