As soon as I read ‘dog or cat’ for this exercise I thought of the book character ‘Whatamess’ the Afghan Hound. He was a scruffy and over enthusiastic puppy of this breed who had fun adventures and I thought it would be interesting to re-imagine him. So I started with a ‘realistic’ sketch of and Afghan Hound and then made several 5 line interpretations of the dog. Thinking of textures to use to represent his fur I printed of some images of tangled wires and plugs which I used to collage on the last 5 line sketch.
I decided I liked the tangled wires but wanted to make them come out of the actual dog amongst his fur. I transferred the linework to card and coloured with watercolour markers. There emerged Plug, the power dog; a dog that can provide power to different devices from the plugs in his coat. He needed an accomplice so I drew PC Boy who helps him to find victims of devices that have lost power. Together they find the disconnected victims and power up their devices. So I drew a boy and his black screened iPad.
The background is a deserted street to convey the idea of the child being alone before the two heroes turn up. I drew it in black and white to keep attention on the narrative.
