[ARTIST] Cattail Curios
Sketching light and quiet company
Great art is a great story. This week we’re highlighting Misha Morales, the illustrator behind the fancifully rendered Cattail Curos sticker collection. She explains her design process below; click the images to visit her Instagram and sticker shop.
What type of artist are you?
I’m primarily working in both traditional and 2D digital art, and aspiring to be a visual development/background design artist for TV animation as well as a tattoo artist on the side! I would LOVE to get into 3D, but there are just so many technical terms and software to learn that it’ll have to wait — I’m barely learning how to use Photoshop! :’)
What are your goals as an artist?
If you couldn’t tell from the lack of a sole medium in my response to the previous question, my ultimate goal has always been to be an interdisciplinary artist, one who is not bound to one specific medium.
I always like to think of it as an artist who incorporates their hobbies into their work — whether that be utilizing sculpture, scrapbooking, painting, digital 2D and 3D designing, etc., woven together to make something neither here nor there (an official term for artists that marked undecided for their major, haha). It’s always been difficult for me to stick to just one medium or purpose. Any time I try out a new subcategory of art, I fall in love and find myself in debt from all the new supplies I hoard…
It’s also important for me that my work invokes a sense of calm, comfort, and confidence similar to the incredible work of Hayao Miyazaki — art to keep light and quiet company. I want to compose a simple yet obvious story within a piece and maintain a sense of romance found in the everyday and ordinary.
While my Etsy shop is currently only stickers, I would eventually love to introduce new mediums of art! I’ve always imagined running a shop selling stickers, totes, apparel, stationery, and handcrafted jewelry/charms, and pottery, hence the “curios” in my shop name!
Tell us about your process: what happens after you've settled on an idea?
Because of how limitless the conceptualization process is, I like to look at monthly prompt challenges created by other artists and choose a theme to prevent myself from creating too broad or generalized of a piece. Once I’ve determined my theme, I think of different stories or moods I want to tell visually.
I often gather a max of 10-15 references that would best tell that theme and story and start sketching thumbnails for composition. Once I find the best one, I tie down my references to the piece and clean up with the final line work and color. After that, I cry because it’s not quite there yet, not post the piece and rework it in a couple of months until I’m satisfied with it haha.
When it comes to creating designs for new stickers, I love to go back to the films I reference and grab screenshots of the more obscure moments to create something that has a less likely chance of already existing. I personally love having obscure objects as the main focus of my designs just because I’ve always been one of those people who admire all the effort put into the background (I am aspiring for a career in background design after all !!!).
After finding that perfect subject, I have to think about how the design works in terms of physical size and clarity, as I use a third party to print my weather- and water-proof specific stickers. I’ve tried to make my own but the quality is not great and is closer to water-resistant, as most homemade stickers are. Once I receive the shipment of new stickers, I test them out by submerging them underwater for increments of time to test. (They have yet to fail!) The same process applies to designing freebies and packaging.
How do you distribute your art, and how does that inform the process of making it?
Right now, my art for Cattail Curios exists only in two spaces: virtually, on Etsy, and in person, tabling with The Daily Egg at zine festivals!
Packing orders for Etsy is something I really enjoy doing, just because I can leave a personalized thank you and make it all cute. I like to write on the backs of Ghibli postcards related to the item a buyer purchased. It’s like a platonic love letter from me expressing my gratitude for the support.
Where can people find you?
I have two accounts on Instagram! @CattailCurios is my account for my Etsy stickers and @mishalynmorales for all of my other work!
Portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity.
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