Meet Guile Gaspar, the human behind the cats
This week, our YouTube video documents a chat with our art director about some of the interesting facts behind the CryptoKitties Art.
How did you come up with the cats?
The team wanted to make the product appealing to a broad audience, so Guile knew he had to make cats with a wide spectrum of emotions and characters. He started with six or eight sketches, and tested them within the team. The first traits ever designed were the saycheese mouth and crazy eyes. That evolved into one of our mascots!
There was no way to be sure if people would relate to the cats, but after we launched and saw what the community was doing with the cats, it was very inspiring. People are painting the cats on their nails, creating wood block art — one guy even got a tattoo of Momo-chan and Stitches! (Watch our video to see his video of getting the tattoos!)
What’s the creative process behind Fancy Cats?
The team gets together and collectively comes up with the idea behind the cat. Then, Guile researches visual inspiration. He’ll browse through Pinterest, do Google searches, immerse himself in the concept behind the cat. Then he starts sketching, using a pen tablet and Adobe Photoshop. Once he’s happy with the sketch he jumps into Adobe Illustrator to do the line work, and then he returns to Photoshop to paint the cat. You can watch Guile painting a cat in the video!
Hey Guile, what’s your favourite Fancy Cat?
It’s not an easy decision, but he really loves BugCat, it was super fun to draw and the reaction from the community was really great. What’s your favourite Fancy Cat? Comment below!
New Environmental traits
We just released the salty trait (underwater cats!) and there are more coming! Keep your eyes peeled.
Weirdest Fancy Cat ever
We thought of a capybara Fancy Cat because it’s such a weird animal, but we never went ahead with it.
Fan art
Guile literally saves all your fan art on his computer because he loves it so much. So put it out there with a CryproKitties hashtag so he can find it, and love it, and get those warm fuzzy feelings like a cat is purring on his stomach!
