As for the cat, I used Garfield as a reference for a more cartoonish look.

Sculpt workflow

When I’m working on a personal project, I prefer to make it as useful for me as possible and take a chance to improve myself. That’s why I try not to use base meshes or recycling old characters. For Brigitte, I started with a sphere for the head and cylinder for the body. The cat was started as a sphere. My first step is blocking the large shapes and features of the character. The main goal is having all the character blocked as fast as I can so that I could see the overall look. The important thing for me is a good silhouette of a model, so I usually work with the model zoomed out to focus on the large shapes first and then start working on the details.