Watercolor Kitten

Happy New Year! Let's make 2015 a great year filled with love, family, friends and of course, ART!!

Last Christmas, I gave my friend a little watercolor painting of her kitten.  She got another kitten over the summer and when I asked her what she'd like for Christmas this year, she asked if I would be able to do another painting of the new kitty so she could display them together.  I was more than happy to, as I love cats and really enjoy doing animal portraits for people. 

When I paint animals, the first thing I start with is the eyes. If the eyes are wrong, the rest of the painting will be wrong, so that's why I start there. I also love painting eyes, the challenge of making them look real with different tones and colors and highlights. It's the best part of the painting!

 He seems to look a little angry here, but that's just the shape of cat eyes. So enjoyable to paint, especially in watercolor. I love painting cat's green eyes, like my cat has and my friend's other cat. This little guy has more yellowish eyes though, and finding that shade was a little tricky. I used some sap green, yellow ochre, naples yellow and burnt umber. I think. 

Next is just the progression of the rest of this face, body and background.

"Maverick", watercolor on paper. 4"x6". 

Cat doodles!

Yesterday, I was playing around more with the cat doodles from my previous post.  I've seen all these "sharpie mug" tutorials going around Pinterest and I thought the cats would make a really cute pattern.  Our apartment came with an assortment of mugs, including two plain white ones, perfect for this project.  I don't think the owner of the apartment will mind that one of them is now decorated, so long as he gets the same number of mugs at the end ;-)

I looked through several tutorials before I started, and it seems the best idea would have been to use an oil based Sharpie paint marker.  I don't have paint markers, and someone else had said the regular black ones work fine, so that's what I used.  I drew the cats on the mug and followed the baking instructions (put cold mug in cold oven, heat to 350 for 30 minutes, then let sit in the oven and cool off until oven is cool). 

It came out really cute and I was excited about it, but figured its permanence should be tested.  I scratched it with my fingernail, and nothing happened. Then I took the rough side of a sponge and warm, soapy water to it and the marker did come off with some scrubbing.  I don't normally scrub my mugs that way after using them, especially on the outside, but I wouldn't put it in the dishwasher after that. 

 

Notice the scrubbed off kitties :(  So for my experience, I would definitely try it with an oil based paint marker, it would hopefully be more permanent.  But this is ok, I probably won't drink out of it but just having such a cute little cat mug around will make me smile anyway. 

I wanted to play with the cats in watercolor as well, so I grabbed a little watercolor postcard and got to work.

 

Unfortunately, I'm having trouble trying to rotate this properly, but you get the idea.  I like the cats much better solidly filled in.  But this was the point of this weekend, to doodle and play with no high expectations of masterpieces.   

Until next time!

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...