Cat 43

Cat 43: Toby, Calico and Sonja.
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".

This is an attempt at an illustration for a children's story being written by a friend, who supplied three separate pictures- one of each cat in the story. The interesting challenge was to incorporate them together in a convincing arrangement. I got the impression that in reality, none of these cats would have come with five feet of each other.
All three photo's were taken at slightly different angles, so keeping the perspective consistent took some manipulation. I wanted the two lesser characters smaller, looser and in the background, with the main character larger and more detailed in the foreground.
Once again, I am having major problems with the straight on frontal view of the cat face. I thought I had it all figured out, using a ruler to double check the relative proportions, and ended up struggling with this one small area of face for over a week.

A better shot of the cat was provided the other day, and I immediately saw the problem; I had given him a Burmese type head structure instead of a longer, more masculine Egyptian type muzzle.
It is still not quite right, but much closer to what I wanted to see this time.I may fiddle with this a bit more, after it has a chance to dry out and set up.

The black and white cat had an interesting foreshortened angle, which I had to get "creative" with to get it to fit in the space, and added more distortion in the process. I could keep diddling with this indefinitely to see how it could be improved, but its time to move on.

This was probably nuts, trying to get these three into a square format.

Cat 42

Cat 42, Cat Bath.
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".

Lizzy cleaning her foot, sitting on dad's old computer chair. It's her chair now, because the cat hair imbedded in the fabric is permanent- I can't get it out.

I haven't touched this painting for nearly a week, so I suppose I am done with it.

With this painting I made a point of sticking to a more limited range of colors, and softened the edges of forms more than I usually do. I am happy with the results. I like the simple diagonal forms, and the simple background.
I'm not sure I like the yellow tint in the background being the same as on the chair seat- it puts the two on the same visual plane. The yellow background wants to pull forward next to the cooler toned chair back. This flattens the whole thing.
I may rethink that, and cool down the wall in the background so it visually recedes behind the chair.
Or maybe I like the tension?

Cat 41

Cat 41: Cat Nap.
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".

I wanted a very fluid, curvaceous photo to work from, and found one of Lizzy napping on the bed.
I also made a point of trying to work with some colors that I don't use often, to see what I can discover. Here I used violet, ochre and raw sienna, cooled down with ultramarine blue.
After the initial drawing I covered the board with various mixtures of the colors, with the intention to loose any pure white areas. I wanted to build in the whites later. I thought I'd leave the background on this as ambiguous fabric, but in the end, I added the stripe pattern.

Editing through shots I've taken of finished works, I'm noticing that I prefer the under exposed darker shots to the more accurate shots of the picture. This leads me to think I'm over using the light values and white.

I am also mulling over the rigid quality of the previous painting, and how to modify that direction. I would like to see more variation using both soft edged and hard edged forms, instead of everything being in sharp focus. The obvious would be to soften out some or all of the edges as they occur. That is pretty much how my vision is anyway- my eyesight tends to fuzz and blend the edges of forms. Another problem might be that I don't stop when I should, and keep adding to the surface.

Cat 40

Cat 40: Lizzy in the laundry.
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".

Lizzy likes to burrow in to the pile of clean laundry, still warm from the dryer. Which is why everything I own is embellished with cat hair.

I finally surfaced from working on taxes long enough to push paint around.  Here, I was aiming for a more fluid, less hard edged look, and thought working with fabric might help achieve that.
What I liked about this pose was the strong diagonal top left to bottom right, with the opposing diagonal of the right ear.  I also like the reflected colors in the white chest.
I'm not convinced this is finished, but it is time to put it aside and move on.

Cat 39

Cat 39.
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".

I have have my nose buried in working on my fathers federal taxes the past couple weeks, and not very productive with the paintings.
On this, I decided to try using a monochromatic under painting in raw umber to establish the range of tonal values, then applied color on top of that base.

The only real difference was that I arrived at the end point a lot quicker, where I diddle endlessly with details. I still ended up making some not -so-great compositional moves that were labor intensive to correct later on. But I have to let it go and move on.

Building with under painting has the disadvantage of losing spontaneity. Overall, it looked too hard edged and rigid to me- working on the smooth surface tends to yield very hard edged forms by nature.
I got into a real battle with the green floor mat again, trying to get the texture and values to work together. I am still finding green very difficult to work with for some reason.
I tried to resolve the hard edge feel by softening some edges with a worn out brush. I'm not certain why I am insisting on fighting this quality, when I should be exploiting it and using it to my advantage.

I like the effect using thin washes to build the aluminum screen door in the background, although the half circle shape is starting to bother me. It may be too strong.
I intended to use more linear texture using tools to scrape fine lines into the paint, but decided it wasn't working so well on this piece. The green floor mat was built up with numerous layers of greens and blues, which were pulled off and scraped off at various stages of drying. This is proving to be challenging, with a very small window of time to work the top layer of paint before it dries too much to manipulate. An extender would probably be useful here.