Design Spotlight: Rosanne, Red Rose Digital Art

Today, our Design Spotlight is on Rosanne of Red Rose Digital Art – what a beautiful kitty! And thanks, Roseanne, for giving us a fantastic design to admire.

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Perfect Birman Cat, Happy Birthday - Red Rose Digital Art

Hi, I am Rosanne Casu from Red Rose Digital Art, and I am one of GCU’s “international” artists. I may not have been quite the first one from Australia, but pretty close!

By profession, I am a molecular biologist but my hobby of photography has evolved in the past few years into an additional, albeit very part-time, profession that is conducted after hours. Photography is a wonderful combination of art and science so, I suppose, my analytical/left brain side loves the techniques and my arty/right brain side just enjoys capturing beauty.

It’s hard for me to choose a favourite card to profile today since so many of them represent mastering a new technique or having the privilege of photographing something that is completely new, at least to me. So, after much internal debate, I decided NOT to choose one of my signature rose cards but one of my older cards, featuring Rani, my cat.

Rani is an extremely regal Blue Birman cat who is possibly one of the worst cat models of all time. Most of the time, she either runs away from me or straight towards me when I point my camera at her. Both techniques are extremely effective at preventing me from capturing a quality image of her. However, there have been a few times when she became very engrossed in supervising me when I was conducting a “photo shoot” of some flowers in my living room. Because of this, I was able to turn the camera on to her and grab some images before she disappeared.

Rani is naturally pale cream with blue-grey points (ears, nose, tail and lower legs except for her little white feet) so, for this image, a black and white conversion worked extremely well. However, she has lovely blue eyes so I left the colour in them, making them the feature of the image. Her expression is also quite wistful and sweet.

I love birthday cards with cat images on them, so I thought that this image would work well in that context. For the “Happy Birthday” on the front, I picked out a blue that was very similar to Rani’s eye colour and also used one of my favourite fonts, Marydale. For the inner verse, I just channelled Rani and you can read the result! I had a lot of fun making this image and the card it evolved into – I hope that you enjoy the result.