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!

New ATC's

In a previous post, I had done mixed media drawings on book pages I had printed and stamped on.  After doing several of those, I thought it would be fun to do some artist trading card (ATC, 2.5"x3.5") sized art, so I cut up a few of the remaining book pages and glued them to watercolor paper for extra support.  I did a couple flower ones (I really love drawing poppies, and since I have a colored pencil called "poppy red", that worked well!) and then a few random ones.

I really love the pink and blue ones (the one with the plumeria and the poppies), those were my favorite backgrounds. And I think the color of the flowers goes really nice with the backgrounds.  I wish I had more of those to go around.  

Colored pencil and extra fine sharpie marker on printed and stamped background.

Both of these are also colored pencil and black extra fine
sharpie marker on printed background.  I love having a pencil called "poppy red"! When I did these, I actually had to do the pencil outline of the flower and then gesso the inside so I was coloring a white surface.  The top one originally was just the pencil on top of the blue background, and the red and blue together made pretty muddy colors, so I gesso'd over them and colored them again.  Much better color!

I love drawing octopus (octopi?). This is also colored pencil on printed book page. Outlined with extra fine sharpie and white gel pen. The white gel pen starts out bright, clean white but as it dries it kind of takes on the colors under it for some reason.

I don't know if you've noticed yet, but I love to paint my cat. He's such a regal animal and at first I thought painting a black cat was difficult, because I could never see much detail in the photos I took of him. But I just kind of go with it and have a lot of fun. In this photo, he was sitting under the table and there was a lot of light coming from the window behind him lighting up his left side and the other was much more in shadow and I couldn't even really tell where he ended and shadows began, haha. 

Inspired by my trips to Italy, and Venice in particular.  I absolutely love all the masks on display everywhere. I took a ton of photos of them when I was there. I would actually love to do a whole series of masks.

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!