Harry

Today's painting is of Harry, another of Joanna's cats.  I just love to paint these cute tabby cats!  I love the markings around their eyes, like eye makeup : - )

First I sketch out the face with pencil on a black gessoed panel.  Then paint in the dabs of paint.

Here is the adorable Harry ...

 And my version of him ...

You can see Harry and his sister Lulu and my other paintings here on Daily Paintworks.

Black and White Cat Value Study Paintings

Today's shelter cat is Freddie and I liked all three pictures of Freddie so I decided to do three value studies of him.  I am watching some of Peggi Kroll Robert's videos and she is real big on value and value studies.  Her series of video painting lessons are the BEST.  I highly recommend them!

I painted these 5 x 7 acrylic paintings on canvas board with a black gesso ground and tried to do them fairly quickly.  Here are the preliminary sketches on the boards ...

And here is the photo of Freddie and the finished painting.

You can find it at my Daily Paintworks Gallery page here.

Elfie

Well, today's painting was successful for me because I was trying to simplify my values down to three or so.  My value study sketch was cracking me up because it looked just like a werewolf (and still does somewhat) - ha!  Anyway, today was a good painting day.  I can tell because I used only two pieces of paper towel, so that means getting it right and not dithering away on it.  Here's Elfie, today's shelter kitty.  I thought it would be fun to paint some black cats to get in the Halloween mood : - )

And here's the werewolf like sketch of cute Elfie ...

And finally the 6x6 acrylic painting ...

You can find the painting here at Daily Paintworks.

Oreo

Another tuxedo cat!  This pretty kitty from Petfinder is named Oreo.  I did a value sketch first and then mooshed on the paint.  Hey, my Katta painting is one of the paintings of the day today on Daily Paintwork's Facebook page!  How exciting!

Oreo is available here on my Daily Paintworks gallery page.

Katta

I'm happy with today's painting of Katta, another cat from Petfinders.  I wanted to do some work on my values, so I did a value sketch of the lovely Katta and then referred to that simple sketch whilst painting.  I think it really helped me to simplify my value design and get closer to what I was looking to do.  Here is the real Katta ...

Here is the value sketch ...

And finally, here is the painting ...

You can see Katta here at my Daily Paintworks Gallery.

Wednesday

The next in my shelter cat paintings is black kitty Wednesday.  I'm a big fan of black cats - I have two of my own.  I especially love their little mouth area and I found that kind of fun to paint today.  Since I was painting a yellow background for Wednesday, I primed my canvas board with a purple-y magenta color so it could show through here and there.

This painting is available at my Daily Paintworks gallery here.

Posey

I would like to say I have a lot of good photos of my cats to paint, but usually when I go to take their picture, they give me the "I'm so bored" look or they run away.  So I do have plenty of cat butt photos and ones with disdainful expressions.  How is one to paint a cat every day with such uncooperative cats?  I got to thinking about Karin Jurick's series of paintings of mug shot pictures and I thought - I know!  I can paint shelter cats.  Not that the cat shelters equate to prisons!  But there are sure a lot of kitties out there on Petfinder.  So today's Petfinder cat is called Posey.  Really beautiful blue eyes on this pretty kitty!

Posey is available at my Paintworks gallery here.