Cat Cafeteria

Digital, comic illustration and layout, 2025

Cat Cafeteria is my debut graphic novel published by Komiket. Part of the Official Selection of the Philippine International Comics Festival (PICOF), it is a story about Kit and Mama Mining who take care of the community cats in their neighborhood by feeding them and doing Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return (TNVR) initiatives.

Design

I had complete freedom in the illustration, style, art direction, and book design with guidance and feedback from my editor Paolo Herras.

For the cover, I wanted a clean white solid background where the cats would be. Since caring for community cats involves feeding them daily, this is the aspect of community cat care that I wanted to focus on on the cover. The contrast of the cats on the solid white background easily gets the attention of readers, and of course, cats are always adorable subjects we can’t get enough of!

I also kept the front matter on white pages, since the inside illustrations would be in full color. This is to distinguish these parts of the book from the main story. The color orange signifies ginger cats!

The Table of Contents features chapter titles with the word ‘cat’ in them to fully align with the Cat Cafeteria theme. Meanwhile, the chapter title pages shows the different cats readers would meet in the book.

For a human touch, I made the handwriting for the Cat Cafeteria title and byline on the cover, as well as the chapter titles.

Illustration

I started working on Cat Cafeteria sometime in the early months of 2023. At first, I had a style that incorporated a full color palette, meaning, I didn’t prepare selected swatches at first.

As I worked on the book through months, I didn’t feel satisfied with the style, so I came up with color swatches I wanted to use the eyedropper tool on. I chose subdued colors with a dark brown line color for the inking, so that the colors of the cats would pop out.

I also received feedback on the initial style: the line art was a bit too thick and perfect looking, so I dialed down on these aspects on the output. This gave me more space to focus more on the ambience and emotions rather than technique, meticulous details, and time-consuming rendering that took away from the heart of the story. Having a limited and subtle style and palette allowed the story—and the cats!—to shine against the watercolor wash style.