Cats, Crazy Cats.....

Well, finally all eighteen cats are done! We have wood cats, playing card cats, moon lit cats and cat eyes.


I did a lot of sketching trying to get the look of cats with just simple lines. Jim noticed the sketches and mentioned that they would be perfect for something he was thinking about trying out. He had found this piece of really thin birch plywood and wanted to try it out. We decide my cats needed to be highlighted some how, so we came up with the cats on the fence in the moonlight. These are the beautiful result of a lot of painstaking cutting (by Jim). I do love it when he puts his mind to something artistic!

I then realized that these same drawings would be a good way to try out some water colours. I broke out a set of my kids water colours and gave it a try. It was really cool to see how when you wet the paper in just the area that you want to paint, the paint stays in that wet spot. For example I wet down just the moon area, fence, cat and sky were left dry. Then just dabbed in the yellow. Now if only I can figure out how to bring the sky up to the moon without bleeding in.
Oh well lots to learn and it was fun enough to go back for more.


As you can tell, just hand drawn eyes from my mind. I wanted to play around some more and see what I could do. I sort of used the brush like my colour pencils for the fur. The black on the top eye was done with black and the one on the bottom was done with several colours to make black, like I would with CP. I like the made up black better.


I ended up ditching the ace of clubs and I did fix the ears on the jack with white out. I know I am a terrible cheat. Doing these outline and silhouette drawings I have come to realize that I do a lot of fixing and shaping as I fill in with pencil or CP.