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.