Why I’m Still Making Hawa Cat

Blog post description.

Eve Hennessa

6/15/20265 min read

Hawa Cat Desert Fantasy is available as a signed museum-quality print. It may also be available through the Hawa Cat print-on-demand shop as unsigned prints and select merchandise, including home decor and gift items. Signed prints are limited, hand-signed, and intended as collectible art. https://hawacat.com/museum-quality-hawa-prints

Here it is in a more classic blog format, with normal paragraph spacing and some shorter sections so it does not look like every sentence is floating by itself.

Hawa Cat was born in the NFT art market in 2020. Six years later, I’m completely obsessed with my cat.

There are hundreds of digital art cats and NFT cats out there, so why am I still bothering? For me, Hawa Cat has become an expression of so many things I think about and feel as a person — different philosophical ideas, personal struggles, and a love of constant experimentation. I’ve always been an innovator, never a follower, and little by little over time I’ve created something unique.

You have to realize I was seriously brain injured in 2020 and I’ve had a really stressful, crazy five years — as probably most people have. I wasn’t just sitting around drawing cats, but it has definitely become a staple of my art process.

I’m showing this close-up because the cat has gone through so many iterations or levels. When I see my early Hawa Cats, I think they look like a five-year-old did it. In digital art you can save copies of things, redo them, and reuse them in different ways.

What I like about this cat that I’m doing right now is that I have time to go in and put more details in it, so right now I’m making very fine cat hairs. Oh yeah, I mentioned I kind of stole this leopard fur style from Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC), of course anyone who owns an NFT can recognize that.

The first Hawa Cats were made using the smudging tool to create some fur. But now I clean up the smudges and I’m actually giving it lines and also some pencil marks.

What I like about the detail image is all the different textures living together. There is smudge, there are remnants of the Hawa Cat drawing from three years ago, there are different pencil markings from when I went back in and worked the fur, and then finally there are the very fine pencil marks I added today. All of those layers create texture, and texture is one of the things that makes art more interesting and beautiful.

Why I’m Still Making Hawa Cat

-Hawa Cat, digital art, and creating art that has never existed before.

-The art process behind Hawa Cat Desert Fantasy.

-Finding the balance between paint and digital art.

-How Hawa Cat is becoming more sophisticated.

Detail of Hawa Cat Desert Fantasy, showing the layered digital brushwork, fur markings, and painterly texture

As a painter, I’m not really trying to make artwork like other people. I know that most NFT character art is very smooth and very perfect. That doesn’t interest me. That’s also why I made the eyes very realistic — because why not?

I really don’t want to be a full character artist. I want to find something different. For me, digital art is about finding the balance between something hand-drawn and something purely graphic. That balance is really interesting to me. I don’t want the work to become too slick or too perfect. I still want the painterly feeling in there — the roughness, the marks, the handmade energy — even when the final image is digital.

I’ve always been very interested in Japanese art from the early 20th century, which works with a lot of flat pattern. I am still experimenting and coming up with something that I like. I’m a true artist, so I can’t just do the same thing over and over, and I’m not a production company and I don’t have a team.

I like the AI backgrounds sometimes. By that I just mean I painted over it or smudged it or collaged it.

I have art dealers. That’s how my paintings sell at high prices, but I’m busy making cats for which I’ve really made almost no money. I’m determined to get my stuff out there and really perfect my Hawa Cat Universe.

The art dealers that sell my work do not like my cats at all. You can tell by people’s reactions if they like your work or not. I know who I am as an artist and I know I’m always ahead of my time.

So it might take some time for this kind of crossover art to become popular. In the meantime, I’m working my ass off night and day.

I’m building OpenClaw bots to do my social media posting and using ChatGPT and Grok (@grok). You helped me build my website, which is doing very well.

Being a solo artist is an unbelievable amount of work. I do have a lot of good Hawa Cats in my iPad. But you could be the best artist in the world and if you don’t do the business and social media very well, nobody will ever know.

So this year, I will master communication. I’ve been working on it for a long time.

You see this picture. I will add the full picture below, which I like very much. I just wanted to show the details. It has a handmade look because it is very much handmade.

If you like it, please comment and share. If you know any galleries who are looking for this kind of work or collectors, please tag them or tell them or let me know!

I really need help because I’m working way too hard!

This is contemporary art, y’all!

Hawa Cat Digital Art painting Jaguar desert Fantasy Blue eyes

Hawa Cat Desert Fantasy, full digital painting by Eve Hennessa. Hawa Cat stands in a glowing desert world, with pattern, color, and painterly digital marks.

Collect

About Eve Hennessa

Eve Hennessa is a contemporary artist whose work moves between painting, digital art, performance, blockchain culture, and the Hawa Cat universe. She studied for her master’s degree at UNAM in Mexico City, at the Academia de San Carlos, and also studied in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. She has spent time painting in Paris, and her work has been shown in museums and galleries and collected internationally.

Eve became a digital artist through the NFT and blockchain art world, where she saw new possibilities for artists to create, exhibit, and connect directly with collectors. She is also a speaker, curator, and innovator in Web3 and blockchain art. She has spoken at conferences, built and curated art exhibitions in the metaverse, created blockchain-based art projects, and continues to explore how new technology can expand contemporary art.

Her work combines fine art training, painterly experimentation, digital tools, and a lifelong drive to create images that have never existed before.

Links: EveHennessa.com ·

Spatial Galleries :

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SOFTER WORLD contemporary digital and glitch art