Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Elvis Presley’s… Elvis Presley. So many classic albums by our favorite artists have had equally iconic album art.
So many of those covers from our old ’45s have become iconic parts of our pop culture in their own right. But one artist has found a way to make them even better:
By remaking them with cats!
The hilarious site, dubbed “The Kitten Covers,” is the work of a graphics designer named Alfra Martini. When she started the project in 2011, she was working at a record label and as a vintage poster dealer.
It was while visiting local record shops for work that she found inspiration for the project.
“Sifting through online catalog after catalog, well, you revisit some iconic album covers and, if you are like me, you get distracted by the graphic decisions and the exaggerated style of rock iconography,” she told Humor in America.
She was suddenly struck by the idea of a cat David Bowie—specifically a cat in his iconic Aladdin Sane cover.
Alfra decided to make her vision a reality, which became the first of many Kitten Covers. After making a few more, she started posting them on Tumblr, intending just to share them with friends.
Instead, the blog caught on, and dozens more kitten-fied album covers followed.
It’s clear that a lot of love went into these posters, and that Alfra went to great lengths to capture the poses and art style of the classic covers… something that can be attributed to being a die-hard music fan and a dedicated artist.
“I … have a huge rock poster collection, because I’ve always been fascinated by rock n’ roll iconography,” she told NPR. “It can be at the same time so freakin’ hip and so silly!”
“I’ve worked both in graphics and in vintage poster restoration, so I’m a freak about details,” she added. “And since I have very little free time, I’ve learned to work fast. I was hoping to make some friends laugh but had no idea how popular The Kitten Covers would become.”
Alfra said that her music taste can be very eclectic and spanning many genres—evidenced by her choice of artists, which span from recent artists back to Bing Crosby. So how do you pick which ones need cats?
“Basically any cover can be kittenized,” she told Humor in America. “It’s more a matter of which artists I consider keystones in music history.”
But technical factors need to be taken into consideration, and albums with a lot of faces are too complicated—thus, there’s no cat version of The Beatles’ legendary but very crowded album artwork for Sgt. Pepper.
Alfra says that while there can be a funny contrast between the adorable kittens and the hard-edged rock stars, there’s actually more in common between them then you’d think:
“How many creatures are pampered and adored as much as kittens and rockstars? And how many creatures have such big hair?” she said.
Unfortunately it seems the blog has slowed down in recent years—the most recent Kitten Cover was in 2016.
Still, there’s dozens of great works on there that will satisfy fans of any genre (and any cat breed.) You’ll never look at your favorite artists again once you’ve seen them as kittens.
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