A Black Cat Halloween

In honor of Halloween, I'm going to share some small paintings I've done of my brother's black cat.  I love this guy and I take tons of photos of him whenever I'm home for a visit. (He's very photogenic).  Several of these photos have  become references for paintings.  They're on the small side, the largest is only 9"x7". 

Watercolor on paper, 9"x7"

Watercolor on paper, 3.5"x2.5"
Artist Trading Card (ATC) size.

Cut paper, about 1.5"x2".

Acrylic on mini stretched canvas, 2"x2.75".  


Happy Halloween!

Doodling...

 Two days ago, I finished another two wedding gown drawings purchased from my Etsy shop (yay!!)

Before that, I was working feverishly on the Queen Anne's Lace painting I wanted to hang over the dining table.  It's been weeks of working hard on projects, and I wanted to just unwind and play without the pressure of a "perfect" final piece. 

I was in a shop a few weeks ago and there was a little girly backpack that had a pattern of cute little cartoon cats on them.  I fell in love with the little cats but I didn't want to buy the backpack so I took some pictures so I could play with the pattern.

The 4 little pencil drawings are sort of copied from the cat pattern, but I refined them a bit. The larger one is a doodle I tried to make from a painting I did of my own cat. I love the bottom two the most, so I played with those some more. These doodles were pretty small...

So I enlarged them....

...and made stamps! The stamps didn't come out quite as "perfect" as I wanted, but oh well. We're just playing today. They're still really cute, I think.  Then I did them with watercolor.

That's all for the cats today.  I love them though, they're so stinking cute! I can't wait to think of things I can use these for.

Last night, I was playing around a bit too.  I was given a Japanese tea set several years ago as a gift from the mother of a girl I used to babysit.  The mom was a karate master who had her own karate school and had studied in Japan. Their house was filled with beautiful Japanese crafts.  I love this tea set, but with moving around a lot the last few years, the tea set sat at my parents house unused.  When we came to Scotland, I packed it and put it in a box to ship here because I wanted to use it.  It was a little cast iron pot with 6 ceramic cups. Simple, delicate, beautiful.  Well, I packed it badly and when it arrived, all but one of the cups was smashed.  I was devastated.  The surviving cup has a chip and a crack, so it can't be used, but I won't throw it out.  I've been wanting to put it in a still life, so I started sketching it last night.  I was trying to do the cup and I was at it for about an hour and just couldn't get it symmetrical. Then, I just dove in with the pot and sketched without caring about the outcome at all and I was pretty impressed with what I did! Especially the handle, it was amazingly correct! The back part is a little lopsided I guess, but look at the handle!! :-D Again though, this was just going in without trying to make it perfect and I surprised myself. :)

Then I started doodling my wine glass and the Eiffel Tower and decided it was time for bed...

Portrait of a Cat

I took a photo of my cat a few weeks ago and have wanted to make a painting out of it ever since.  I had another mini canvas floating around with a painting on it I didn't love.  So I gessoed over that and painted my kitty.  I'm liking this little gem much better! 

This is Shinobi.  Acrylic on mini canvas, 2"x2 3/4" on a mini easel.  I painted the edges gold.  You know, one of these days I either need to buy a professional camera or find a friend who has one to take pictures of my art for me.  Looking at the painting sitting right next to me versus looking at this picture, the photo distorts it a bit and the colors aren't quite right.  The background blue is brighter than the photo shows.  Anyway, enough of my camera problems.  

I had done the painting of my friends dog and it made me want to paint my cat.  I did this painting today, took me a few hours.  I'm so bad at keeping track of my hours on artwork, I really should do that...So I made up the chair he's sitting on, in reality he was sitting on a bench in front of a window and I didn't think that would make a great background for a painting.  I'm happy with his little chair.  :)  And I did the background blue because I wanted to keep it simple and I liked that color blue.  Hope you like!