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!!
