Purring, sleeping late, wandering around — I've always found the “cat lifestyle” very appealing and would have loved to have a cat as a roommate. But my wife Kerstin and I lived in a big city, where we didn't want to keep a pet. Eventually, we moved to the countryside, and that's when Stella and Newton came into our lives.

I quickly developed an eye for the non-verbal communication of our furry friends. They have a rich repertoire of facial expressions for a wide variety of complaints, e.g., this particular expression that says nothing other than, “Is there anything else to eat here?”

It is said that cats bring us gifts out of affection. I tend to lean toward the view that cats think we're too stupid to hunt (which is true). Interestingly, our cat Newton often brings home bizarre things in addition to mice: chip bags, ice cream wrappers, empty condom packages—once he actually brought home half a loaf of bread. I have no idea where he finds all this stuff. Stella, on the other hand, often delights us with live mice. She releases them in the bedroom at around 4:25 a.m. and watches with amusement as we try to catch the rodents in our skimpy nightwear... without participating in the hunt, of course. From the beginning, Stella had a phonetic peculiarity – she couldn't really meow, but rather emitted a hotter croak, like after several hours of shouting on the soccer field.

Like many other cat owners, we constantly took photos of our pets. I had long worked as a Photoshop artist creating complex compositions and began to edit Newton and Stella into album covers and movie posters for fun – striking, rocking, cryptic, references to a wide variety of styles and genres.

At some point, I showed the pictures to my colleague Martina. She is also a graphic designer, and together we run a creative design agency. Martina had been surrounded by cats since childhood, so of course she knew that the internet was already flooded with cat pictures. Nevertheless, she saw that the designs had something unique about them and was immediately in favor of us developing them further. In honor of Newton and Stella, we launched the Candy Cats Art Collection.

After my wife Kerstin and I spent an entire afternoon trying to pose with cats for a Christmas card, it became clear to me that our house cats were rather uncooperative models. They had little desire to be photographed constantly. So we soon decided against reworking our photos and began to develop the motifs freely.

Tomcat Newton with his employee Bernd Schmidt

Stella and Newton were two orphaned kittens, and we fell in love with them immediately. Shortly after they moved in with us, they took over our entire house and life. The two were funnier than Tom and Jerry, hungrier than a pack of tiger sharks, more prim and proper than two movie divas, and I'm sure several cat owners were involved in the filming of Alien. Strictly speaking, cats are the best inspiration for any good horror story: these beasts love basements, attics, dark corners. Somehow they are always behind you, they can see in the dark, they suddenly disappear without a trace and then pounce on you shortly afterwards.

The story of the Candy Cats Art Collection

Gourmet, purring artist, constant source of inspiration: Stella the lucky cat