Monday, September 28, 2015

Gaia the Cat with Catitude! and Two Paintings of Lucky - Cat Portraits by Diane Irvine Armitage

I have been working away on a series of custom cat portraits for some really nice people.  Today's painting is of Melissa's Gaia.  This is a cat with serious catitude!!  I absolutely loved painting this cutie - what a face!!  I found that this painting came out more in the style of the Marmalade painting, I think mostly because it was not painted alla prima (all at once).  The first session was getting the canvas covered with the right colors and values and then I blended everything to get really soft transitions.  The second session was putting in the mid-tones and highlights and doing all the fun sketchy brushwork.  Another thing I like about letting the underpainting dry is being able to go in on the background and put one color over another.  This background started out dark and then I put the golden tones over that, leaving a little of the dark to show through here and there.  Anyway, I really like this one :-)
 As you can see, Gaia is a real character!!  I understand that she has a Twitter following :-)
 
Another cat I painted recently is Carla's Lucky.  Lucky was an adorable black cat that, sadly, recently passed away.  Carla had me paint two portraits of Lucky as a surprise present for her husband.  I loved trying to capture Lucky's sweet personality!
 
More black cat portraits are on the way!!

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